(Astrobutterfly.com)

On February 13th-14th, 2026, Saturn moves into Aries – and once it crosses the zero point of the zodiac, there is no turning back.

Saturn first dipped its toes into Aries last year, on May 25th, 2025, giving us a 3-month taste of what this new cycle is about.

On February 13th, Saturn enters Aries now for good, and as soon as it ingresses into the sign, it starts applying a conjunction to Neptune.

With both planets in Aries, we can expect a very concrete shift, where a direction forward becomes blatantly obvious. 

Saturn has a very specific function in astrology: it makes what is vague, elusive, or imagined → real. Saturn gives form to Neptune, making the intangible, tangible. 

Saturn And Neptune – 3D And 4D

Understanding the relationship Saturn and Neptune have is crucial if we want to make sense of the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries on February 20th, 2026.

The starting point here is recognising that we live in 2 parallel realities.

We might think there’s only one reality – the one we can see, hear, smell, and touch – but there are 2 realms operating at the same time, constantly interacting with each other.

The first reality is what we call the 4D or vibrational level – a reality where everything exists simultaneously as a possibility, before it takes shape. This reality is intangible – and everything that eventually takes shape in the ‘real’ world emerges from here. That’s the realm of Neptune. 

And then there’s the 3D reality – the world we experience through our physical senses. This is the world of time, limits, cause and effect, and tangible outcomes. This reality is ruled by Saturn, the last planet visible to the naked eye, marking the boundary between what remains abstract and what becomes real.

Saturn In Aries, Neptune And 0° Aries

And now, from February 13th onwards, when Saturn moves toward Neptune, something important happens. 

As soon as it enters Aries, Saturn directly taps into Neptune’s ocean of potentialities – the 4D reality we talked about – and pulls something out of it, turning what was only an idea, a vision, or a feeling into something that actually exists in the world.

What makes this process special is that Neptune and Saturn are now both at 0° Aries, the very beginning of the zodiac.

This means that whatever Saturn presses the “bring into form” button on will stay with us for a very, very long time – because it emerges from point zero, the navel of the zodiac.

This is not just a new Saturn–Neptune cycle – although even that would have been rare and significant in itself, since Saturn and Neptune meet only every 36 years.

This is something at a much larger scale, because we have 2 concomitant alignments: Saturn with Neptune, and Saturn and Neptune with the point zero of the zodiac.

Think about the big chapters of history. The agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago. The emergence of the first cities and early civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The advent of Christianity. The invention of the printing press. The discovery and spread of electricity.

And even beyond that. Collective myths we’ve lived from for centuries, collective myths that only shift once every thousand years or so.

Saturn And Neptune In Aries – From Myth To Reality

The alignment of Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries belongs to that same order of magnitude as the Library of Alexandria as a symbol of knowledge, the myth of Shambhala as a centre of wisdom, or even farther back, to Atlantis.

Atlantis, whether real or not, describes a Neptune-like society – a civilisation organised around knowledge and subtle intelligence, portrayed as prosperous, refined, and technologically advanced. 

Atlantis lingers in our imagination like a dream, like a paradise lost, and in many ways it mirrors the spell we’ve been under during the last 14 years of Neptune in Pisces.

But Neptune in Pisces was not dreaming for the sake of dreaming, and those 14 years were not lost or wasted. They served a purpose. They were an incubation period, a necessary phase where a vision could form within the fabric of the 4D reality we talked about. 

And now, with Neptune having entered Aries in January and Saturn following from February 13th onwards, the conditions change. 

What has been gestating during Neptune in Pisces is now ready to come to the surface and take shape in lived, 3D reality.

This doesn’t mean we are creating something from scratch, but rather giving form to something that has always been there, held within 4D potentiality.

Neptune in Pisces allowed us to live inside this permeable story of “what ifs”, “should I go left or right, up or down”, and a general sense of openness where we could explore different possibilities, but not commit to any one direction.

With Saturn in Aries, all that moves out of the background and into action.

Saturn In Aries – The Crowning Of Atlantis

The universal myth now comes alive, into the flesh and bones of Saturn’s lived reality.

Something that belongs to the deeper fabric of existence – the DNA of life – is now being translated into structure.

Saturn entering Aries gives that universal myth a name. It makes it conscious. It brings it into our awareness.

And in doing so, it allows us to turn something that has lived unconsciously – shapeless, generic and a little bit unrelatable – into our own personal myth.

Saturn in Aries crowns the Neptunian dream, placing each one of us in a position of authorship. Not as passive participants, but as the hero or heroine of our own story.

Before this, when Neptune and Saturn were in Pisces, we felt part of something big, but more as observers than decision-makers, where we had little or no say. Life happened to us.

Everything changes now. With Saturn and Neptune in Aries, the new myth is no longer a narrative we are told from the outside, but one we step into and shape ourselves.

As Saturn crosses that zero point, it moves into a space where the old rules no longer apply and where there is no return to unconscious living.

We’re no longer in the Matrix – and we can no longer be – because once reality checks in, once we see what we see, we cannot unsee it.

Saturn At 0° Aries – Genesis

Zero is where the old story no longer holds any power over us. Whether confusing, chaotic, or deeply relieving, the point zero reality leaves us no choice but to BE who we really are.

The week between the time Saturn enters Aries (February 13-14) and when Saturn and Neptune perfect their conjunction at 0° Aries on February 20 is KEY in this process.

This is the only time in our lives when these planets are both at the zero degree, and Saturn is applying to Neptune. This week (February 13-20) is the liminal space where the old cycle completes, and the new one takes shape.

When Saturn and Neptune finally meet on February 20, 2026, the seed is irreversibly placed into new soil. From that moment on, there is no more adjusting or rewriting the story.

The Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries on February 20 is the line in the sand. 

With Saturn in Aries, our own “Atlantis” – or whatever name we give to our personal dream or vision – will rise from underwater. It will be given form, structure, and direction.

If you want to consciously engage with this extraordinary alignment, Genesis is a 2-day event that begins just before the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. More details here:

Genesis 2-Day Event For Saturn-Neptune Conjunct At 0° Aries

Frankl in 1965

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

~ Victor Frankl

Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Wikipedia

Born: March 26, 1905, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, Austria

Died: September 2, 1997 

Today, We’re Hung Up About Love and Sex. Turns Out So Were Our Ancestors

by Robert Garland February 12, 2026 (zocalopublicsquare.org)

Were ancient people as hung up about love and sex as we tend to be? Was guilt something they had to deal with? Or embarrassment? Or low desire?

There are few subjects more central to the human condition than physical and emotional intimacy. Much is lost to us about what ancient people got up to behind proverbial closed doors. But the little we do know suggests a timelessness to our spectrum of appetites and impulses.

Modern human behavior is not as original as we might like to think. We were not, for instance, even the first species to kiss: Scientists believe that the earliest smooch took place about 21.5 million years ago, when two large apes decided to give it a try. They must have enjoyed it, because they’ve been at it ever since. Polar bears, albatrosses, and other creatures followed suit. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens picked up the habit a few million years down the evolutionary line, swapping saliva and trading oral microbes.

Likewise, the polyamory of Brooklyn couples pales in comparison to historical couplings. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are polygynandrous, which means that males and females mate with multiple partners. Quite likely our ancestors were polygynandrous, too, before deciding—for the most part—that pair bonding was the way to go.

As for the specifics of human desire, surviving documentation offers us only a selective story. Almost all authors in the ancient world were freeborn males; it’s virtually impossible to access the perspectives of women and enslaved people about their sex lives. In the records that do exist, we learn little about care and commitment or even marital love. No husband says, “I love you” to his wife in the Bible. In funerary inscriptions, Roman husbands extol their deceased wives for their fidelity, industriousness, and obedience; we rarely learn anything personal.

Our understanding of relationships of the distant past is further complicated by the inexactitude of translation. When the Lydian king Candaules uses the word eramai to describe his feelings for his wife in the 7th century B.C.E., it’s not clear whether he’s saying he loves her, he’s infatuated with her, or he lusts after her. The Hebrew Bible uses the verb “know,” ladat, for sexual intercourse, but invariably the man is the subject. What does that tell us about gender dynamics?

Future historians researching love in the 21st century will find a wealth of private correspondence detailing intimacy. Nothing equivalent survives from the ancient world. Egypt has bequeathed exquisite love poetry such as this declaration by a girl to her beloved—“I will be with you every day, setting food before you like a maidservant does before her master”—but it was almost certainly written by a professional scribe. The Old Testament’s Song of Songs speaks of the yearning passion between a boy and a girl—“You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters,” he declares—but again, this is a poetic construct.

Still, we can infer some things about ancient relationships. Sumerian, Egyptian, and Etruscan sculptures depict loving couples warmly embracing. The 1st-century C.E. Greek moralist Plutarch urged couples to express their feelings openly toward each other, “so that just as rope gains strength by entwining the strands, so their communication is strengthened by mutual goodwill.”

The phenomenon of unrequited love, which features prominently in modern-day magazine columns and internet musings, was also very common in the ancient world. The 6th- and 7th-century C.E. Greek poet Sappho never wrote about an emotional or physical relationship, but she was forever yearning for some young woman or another. In their writings, Roman elegists Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid also seemed to be most excited by the ultimate endless futility of their pursuit of a girl always just out of their reach.

Just as we might seek out a self-help book or a podcast in search of support in the love department, so the ancients had their own literature to turn to when they felt anxious or ignorant. Ovid, for instance, advertised himself as “the professor of love” at the opening of The Art of Love, which explores how to pick up girls. The best known sex manual, the Sanskrit Kama Sutra, recommends ways of kissing, embracing, slapping, scratching, and biting—which it extols as highly stimulating.

For the truly desperate, love spells—like those you might acquire from an Etsy witch today—were also an option.

Animal activists would obviously be outraged by the ingredient list of many of the multitude of incantations, magic spells, and curses that existed. One spell found in the Greek Magical Papyri for winning the heart of someone who’s been ignoring you called for gouging out the eyes of a bat. How the caster thought the elements of that spell might interact in a way that would cause the intended victim to undergo a complete change of heart is, to put it mildly, a complete mystery. But that’s not the point.

To be heartsick enough to invite divine intervention to rectify a love problem is a reminder of how fundamental desire has always been to the human condition.

And today, if the powers that be don’t answer, there’s probably a therapist who will.

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Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics, emeritus, at Colgate University. He has recorded six courses for The Great Courses and written many books, including the forthcoming Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Love and Sex in the Ancient World But Weren’t Around to Ask.

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Primary editor: Jackie Mansky | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard

“Live the Self that fills the whole Universe.” Kodo Sawaki (1880-1965) Japanese Zen Teacher

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Man Up / Man Down Feb 12, 2026 In this episode of “Man Up Man Down,” we dive deep into the world of masculine psychology with Rick Belden, a pioneer in men’s personal development. Rick shares his journey from a crisis point in his life to becoming a respected men’s coach and poet. We explore the influence of parental relationships, the evolution of men’s groups, and the importance of self-awareness and emotional resilience. Key Takeaways: Rick’s personal journey and the impact of men’s groups on his life. The significance of understanding and healing the mother and father wounds. The evolution of men’s groups and the changing landscape of masculinity. The importance of developing a strong relationship with oneself. Rick Belden: Men’s coach, poet, and author with over 35 years of experience in exploring men’s issues and recovery from trauma. Links: • Master website: https://rickbelden.com • Coaching website: https://www.rickbeldencoaching.com • YouTube channel:    / rickbelden   • Facebook:   / rickbeldenpoet  

By Matt Shumer • Feb 9, 2026← blog (shumer.dev)

Follow @mattshumer

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Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.

I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.

I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t… my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.

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I know this is real because it happened to me first

Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn’t just better than the last… it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech.

The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first… because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That’s why they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were targeting software engineers… it was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.

They’ve now done it. And they’re moving on to everything else.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.

I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. It’s not built for his specialty, it made an error when he tested it, it doesn’t understand the nuance of what he does. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.

The people who are ahead in their industries (the ones actually experimenting seriously) are not dismissing this. They’re blown away by what it can already do. And they’re positioning themselves accordingly.

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How fast this is actually moving

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

There’s an organization called METR that actually measures this with data. They track the length of real-world tasks (measured by how long they take a human expert) that a model can complete successfully end-to-end without human help. About a year ago, the answer was roughly ten minutes. Then it was an hour. Then several hours. The most recent measurement (Claude Opus 4.5, from November) showed the AI completing tasks that take a human expert nearly five hours. And that number is doubling approximately every seven months, with recent data suggesting it may be accelerating to as fast as every four months.

But even that measurement hasn’t been updated to include the models that just came out this week. In my experience using them, the jump is extremely significant. I expect the next update to METR’s graph to show another major leap.

If you extend the trend (and it’s held for years with no sign of flattening) we’re looking at AI that can work independently for days within the next year. Weeks within two. Month-long projects within three.

Amodei has said that AI models “substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks” are on track for 2026 or 2027.

Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can’t do most office jobs?

Think about what that means for your work.

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AI is now building the next AI

There’s one more thing happening that I think is the most important development and the least understood.

On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical documentation, they included this:

“GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.”

Read that again. The AI helped build itself.

This isn’t a prediction about what might happen someday. This is OpenAI telling you, right now, that the AI they just released was used to create itself. One of the main things that makes AI better is intelligence applied to AI development. And AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing “much of the code” at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is “gathering steam month by month.” He says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

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What this means for your job

I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

Let me give you a few specific examples to make this tangible… but I want to be clear that these are just examples. This list is not exhaustive. If your job isn’t mentioned here, that does not mean it’s safe. Almost all knowledge work is being affected.

Legal work. AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and do legal research at a level that rivals junior associates. The managing partner I mentioned isn’t using AI because it’s fun. He’s using it because it’s outperforming his associates on many tasks.

Financial analysis. Building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment memos, generating reports. AI handles these competently and is improving fast.

Writing and content. Marketing copy, reports, journalism, technical writing. The quality has reached a point where many professionals can’t distinguish AI output from human work.

Software engineering. This is the field I know best. A year ago, AI could barely write a few lines of code without errors. Now it writes hundreds of thousands of lines that work correctly. Large parts of the job are already automated: not just simple tasks, but complex, multi-day projects. There will be far fewer programming roles in a few years than there are today.

Medical analysis. Reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature. AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in several areas.

Customer service. Genuinely capable AI agents… not the frustrating chatbots of five years ago… are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.

A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe. That AI can handle the grunt work but can’t replace human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one. A year ago that would have been unthinkable. My rule of thumb at this point is: if a model shows even a hint of a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These things improve exponentially, not linearly.

Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years of a relationship? I don’t know. Maybe not. But I’ve already watched people begin relying on AI for emotional support, for advice, for companionship. That trend is only going to grow.

I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.

Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.

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What you should actually do

I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.

Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It’s $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you’re using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that’s GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and share what’s actually worth using.

Second, and more important: don’t just ask it quick questions. That’s the mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you’re a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you’re in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you’re a manager, paste in your team’s quarterly data and ask it to find the story. The people who are getting ahead aren’t using AI casually. They’re actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.

And don’t assume it can’t do something just because it seems too hard. Try it. If you’re a lawyer, don’t just use it for quick research questions. Give it an entire contract and ask it to draft a counterproposal. If you’re an accountant, don’t just ask it to explain a tax rule. Give it a client’s full return and see what it finds. The first attempt might not be perfect. That’s fine. Iterate. Rephrase what you asked. Give it more context. Try again. You might be shocked at what works. And here’s the thing to remember: if it even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it’ll do it near perfectly. The trajectory only goes one direction.

This might be the most important year of your career. Work accordingly. I don’t say that to stress you out. I say it because right now, there is a brief window where most people at most companies are still ignoring this. The person who walks into a meeting and says “I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days” is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now. Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what’s possible. If you’re early enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what’s coming and can show others how to navigate it. That window won’t stay open long. Once everyone figures it out, the advantage disappears.

Have no ego about it. The managing partner at that law firm isn’t too proud to spend hours a day with AI. He’s doing it specifically because he’s senior enough to understand what’s at stake. The people who will struggle most are the ones who refuse to engage: the ones who dismiss it as a fad, who feel that using AI diminishes their expertise, who assume their field is special and immune. It’s not. No field is.

Get your financial house in order. I’m not a financial advisor, and I’m not trying to scare you into anything drastic. But if you believe, even partially, that the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago. Build up savings if you can. Be cautious about taking on new debt that assumes your current income is guaranteed. Think about whether your fixed expenses give you flexibility or lock you in. Give yourself options if things move faster than you expect.

Think about where you stand, and lean into what’s hardest to replace. Some things will take longer for AI to displace. Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom. Industries with heavy regulatory hurdles, where adoption will be slowed by compliance, liability, and institutional inertia. None of these are permanent shields. But they buy time. And time, right now, is the most valuable thing you can have, as long as you use it to adapt, not to pretend this isn’t happening.

Rethink what you’re telling your kids. The standard playbook: get good grades, go to a good college, land a stable professional job. It points directly at the roles that are most exposed. I’m not saying education doesn’t matter. But the thing that will matter most for the next generation is learning how to work with these tools, and pursuing things they’re genuinely passionate about. Nobody knows exactly what the job market looks like in ten years. But the people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist by the time they graduate.

Your dreams just got a lot closer. I’ve spent most of this section talking about threats, so let me talk about the other side, because it’s just as real. If you’ve ever wanted to build something but didn’t have the technical skills or the money to hire someone, that barrier is largely gone. You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I’m not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you’ve always wanted to write a book but couldn’t find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done. Want to learn a new skill? The best tutor in the world is now available to anyone for $20 a month… one that’s infinitely patient, available 24/7, and can explain anything at whatever level you need. Knowledge is essentially free now. The tools to build things are extremely cheap now. Whatever you’ve been putting off because it felt too hard or too expensive or too far outside your expertise: try it. Pursue the things you’re passionate about. You never know where they’ll lead. And in a world where the old career paths are getting disrupted, the person who spent a year building something they love might end up better positioned than the person who spent that year clinging to a job description.

Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don’t matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won’t be the ones who mastered one tool. They’ll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.

Here’s a simple commitment that will put you ahead of almost everyone: spend one hour a day experimenting with AI. Not passively reading about it. Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new… something you haven’t tried before, something you’re not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six months, you will understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you. That’s not an exaggeration. Almost nobody is doing this right now. The bar is on the floor.

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The bigger picture

I’ve focused on jobs because it’s what most directly affects people’s lives. But I want to be honest about the full scope of what’s happening, because it goes well beyond work.

Amodei has a thought experiment I can’t stop thinking about. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.”

He thinks we’re building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature enough to handle what it’s creating.

The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious disease, aging itself… these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can’t predict or control. This isn’t hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.

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What I know

I know this isn’t a fad. The technology works, it improves predictably, and the richest institutions in history are committing trillions to it.

I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways most people aren’t prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It’s coming to yours.

I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now — not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency.

And I know that you deserve to hear this from someone who cares about you, not from a headline six months from now when it’s too late to get ahead of it.

We’re past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn’t knocked on your door yet.

It’s about to.

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If this resonated with you, share it with someone in your life who should be thinking about this. Most people won’t hear it until it’s too late. You can be the reason someone you care about gets a head start.

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Thank you to Kyle Corbitt, Jason Kuperberg, and Sam Beskind for reviewing early drafts and providing invaluable feedback.

The performer’s mix of masculine and feminine style evokes a long history of Puerto Rican artists using drag as political protest.

Daniel Villarreal (he/him) September 30, 2025 (lgbtqnation.com)

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Bad Bunny in drag in his music video for “Yo Perreo Solo” (“I Twerk Alone”) | YouTube screenshot

Immediately after Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Bad Bunny was announced as the halftime show performer for the 2026 Super Bowl, right-wingers began trying to “cancel” the cis-het ally by pointing out his refusal to sing in English and his past performances in drag.

Bad Bunny — who grew up in a lower-middle-class barrio near Puerto Rico’s small coastal city of Vega Baja — has always subverted gender norms and expressed his queer-friendly political identity by incorporating masculine and feminine elements into his flashy fashions (which have included bright colors, oversized garments, and eye-catching accessories). But five of his public appearances specifically made headlines for their gender-bending appeal.

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Related

Bad Bunny’s superpower is mixing Latinx bangers with queer political flair

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Here’s a quick look at these five instances, along with a brief exploration of how they reflect the long queer history of Puerto Rico’s drag and gender-bending performers, and how both have sought to express and transcend the island territory’s complex political relationship with the United States.

Fashion activism

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During his February 2020 performance on The Tonight Show, Bad Bunny performed while wearing a large pink blazer and black skirt.

Later on in the show, he revealed a t-shirt that said, “Mataron a Alexa, no a un hombre con falda,” (“They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt”). The t-shirt referenced the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano, a homeless transgender woman in Puerto Rico, who the police report misgendered as a “man dressed in a black skirt.”

A red leather minidress and flawless wig

The music video for the song “Yo Perreo Sola” (“I Twerk Alone”) — released in March 2020 — featured Bad Bunny in a red leather minidress and flawless wig, portraying a sexy woman who really just wants to be left alone to dance by herself at a club.

Later on in the video, he dresses as a long-haired woman whose bright floral outfit accentuates her breasts and buttocks.

Poolside photo shoot in heels

In a February 2022 fashion shoot for the indie luxury brand Jacquemus, Bad Bunny wore a pink dress, pale blue high heels, and other poolside fashions in Miami, an area with a population of 3.7% Puerto Rican descent.

Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CZrwAMRM647/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=14&wp=1080&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lgbtqnation.com&rp=%2F2025%2F09%2Fbad-bunnys-gender-bending-style-isnt-just-fashion-its-a%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A896.0999999940395%2C%22ls%22%3A118.79999999701977%2C%22le%22%3A893.2000000029802%7D

An iconic cover story

In August 2022, Bad Bunny graced the cover of “The Icons Issue” of Harper’s Bazaar magazine in a white tuxedo top and a long white skirt while wearing white, thick-soled workboots and small white earrings.

In his interview with the magazine, he explained, “I always remember seeing the pieces in women’s clothing and they would always fit me so much better and they had so much different variety… I don’t [dress this way] to become more famous or to call attention or to disrespect anyone. People on the outside can think that I have a strategy or I wear this to call for attention, but in reality I just know who I am.”

“Obviously, as you get older, you start seeing what the world shows you, and if I lived my life that way, then I wouldn’t be able to dress in the way that I really want to,” he said, adding that his success and fame have given him the freedom to explore his personal style. “I’m taking advantage of this moment in my life when I can do whatever I want and wear what I want, so I get to live life more authentically.”

Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChUz3ahuFvJ/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=14&wp=1080&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lgbtqnation.com&rp=%2F2025%2F09%2Fbad-bunnys-gender-bending-style-isnt-just-fashion-its-a%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A1%2C%22os%22%3A897.2000000029802%2C%22ls%22%3A118.79999999701977%2C%22le%22%3A893.2000000029802%7D

Floral elegance at the Met Gala

Bad Bunny showed up at the May 2023 Met Gala wearing a white double-breasted suit – backless, as if it were an evening gown – with a 20-foot-long train of white flowers draped around his shoulders.

Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CruiCK5rpWy/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=14&wp=1080&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lgbtqnation.com&rp=%2F2025%2F09%2Fbad-bunnys-gender-bending-style-isnt-just-fashion-its-a%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A2%2C%22os%22%3A897.8999999910593%2C%22ls%22%3A118.79999999701977%2C%22le%22%3A893.2000000029802%7D

Bad Bunny’s drag and gender-bending fashions are part of Puerto Rico’s queer political history

Puerto Rico’s drag and gender-bending performers have long used fashion to explore the island territory’s complicated social politics and relationship with the United States.

The island has hosted influential drag and gender-bending performers since the 1960s, with local icons, like trans performer Lady Cataria, presenting regal pageantry and dancing the Bomba, a traditional Puerto Rican dance with African roots, according to Louie Ortiz-Fonseca.

One of queer history’s most famous queens, Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, was half-Puerto Rican and half-Venezuelan. Born in New York City, she advocated for trans people, sex workers, incarcerated queer people, and other marginalized members of the community that more “respectable” white gays and lesbians at the time seemed eager to hide away.

In the modern era, several Puerto Rican queens have participated in RuPaul’s Drag Race, including Nina Flowers, Yara Sofia, Alexis and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, Alyssa Hunter, and Cynthia Lee Fontaine; several have even drawn large crowds at San Juan’s queer nightclubs.

“‘In this way, the body becomes the main textual terrain for the exploration of issues and politics related to politics, subjectivity, nationality, sexuality, and aesthetics, among many others.”– Puerto Rican critic Gilberto Blasini 

In various ways, these performers have centered their Puerto Rican and Caribbean roots to re-affirm their cultural identities in the face of the American colonialism that has contributed to the island territory’s growing debt, infrastructural decay, and gentrification, all of which have pervaded Puerto Rico since the U.S. first seized control of it in 1899, according to gay Puerto Rican author Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes.

La Fountain-Stokes has helped popularize the term transloca as a way to discuss the numerous ways that drag and queer performers have tried to transcend U.S. influence over the island while also transforming political space around them.

As he explained in his his 2020 book Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, the word loca has long been friendly or pejorative slang that either refers to “crazy females” or effeminate gay men.

La Fountain-Stokes coined the term transloca to include drag performers and trans women activists as a way of examinining how drag and trans art are “a form of entertainment, a catalyst for community growth, and a mechanism of self-expression” that also embody the complexities of Puerto Rican race, gender, sexuality, class, and migration — especially as the territory grapples with its own history of anti-LGBTQ+ violence.

As is happening across the U.S., anti-LGBTQ+ politicians in Puerto Rico have tried to ban drag as an “obscene” threat to children. Simultaneously, the island territory has also experienced its own instances of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, against which Bad Bunny and other local performers have spoken out, through their fashionable performances.

“Translocas are many things, contradictory ones, to be sure: performers, queers, innovators, marginals, exiles, eccentrics, beauties, troublemakers, lovers, loners, friends,” La Fountain-Stokes writes. “The performer/protagonist has to negotiate multiple preconceptions in the very formulation of who he is and how he presents himself—and the profound instability of that in a homophobic, racist, and classist environment, ones that can easily lead to translocura (transmadness).”

“‘In this way,” the author adds, quoting the Puerto Rican critic Gilberto Blasini, “the body becomes the main textual terrain for the exploration of issues and politics related to politics, subjectivity, nationality, sexuality, and aesthetics, among many others.”

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Daniel Villarreal is a longtime, award-winning journalist and editor who has written for NBC News, Newsweek, Vox, Slate, Vice News, The Seattle Stranger, The Dallas Voice and numerous other LGBTQ+ publications. He has spoken at SXSW, Creating Change, Netroots Nation, GaymerX, and is a graduate of GLAAD’s Voices of Color program and of the Poynter Institute’s 2024 Power of Diverse Voices seminar. He is also the founder of QueerBomb Dallas, an annual non-corporate Pride event; CinéWilde, the nation’s longest running monthly LGBTQ film series. He is available for interviews and educational talks.

Connect with Daniel Villarreal: 

February 14:  11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST

Mike Zonta, H.W., M.

In a crisis — any crisis — The Prosperos offers Translation.  Translation Saturday Meetings is a weekly series of Translation presentations by veteran Translators, live and up to date on the issues of the day.

It is not a Translation workshop,  It is not a Translation class.  It is not a group Translation in the usual sense, though group participation is encouraged.

It is, however, restricted to those who have taken Translation class. So if you have never taken Translation class, check the calendar tab on The Prosperos website (TheProsperos.org) or get in touch with us and we will schedule a class.

See you there.

– – – – – – – – – -Expose Yourself fo Translation!!!- – – – – – – – – –

Here’s the link:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81749347119

For more info and link to join please email Mike Zonta at:

zonta1111@aol.com

Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything other than our consciousness.

The claims in a Translation should be outrageous and mind-blowing, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week. 

1)    Truth is that which is so.  That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is.  Truth being all, there is nothing other than Truth, therefore Truth is one.  Truth being one is therefore united, therefore harmonious, therefore Self-sufficient.  I think therefore I am.  Since I am and since Truth is all that is, I cannot be other than Truth, therefore I, being, am Truth (the beingness of me is Truth).  Since there is no being without consciousness of it, therefore Truth is Consciousness.

2)    Only men have prostates and therefore only men can get prostate cancer, prostate enlargement and/or prostate inflammation.  

Word-tracking:
prostate:  to stand before, guardian of the bladder
bladder:  stores urine, gas, waste
waste:  affluent, flowing out
men:  male, sperm producers, designed to fit into the female
cancer:  cancerous, uncontrolled
enlargement:  enlargement
inflammation:  inflamed, irritated

3)    Truth being one cannot be divided into men and women, male and female, therefore Truth inseminates Itself. Truth being all that is and power or potent being the ability to be, Truth is the only ability to be.  Therefore Truth is the only power. Power being control, therefore Truth is the only control.  Truth being all is therefore limitless, therefore infinite, there is no enlargement of infinity.  Therefore Truth cannot be enlarged (or inflated).  Truth being one is therefore at one or atoned.  Truth being atoned, cannot at the same time be inflamed or irritated. Therefore Truth is always “cool as a cucumber.”

4)    Truth inseminates Itself.
        Truth is the only power. 
        Truth is the only control.\
        Truth cannot be enlarged (or inflated). 
        Truth is always “cool as a cucumber.”

5)    Truth is Self-inseminating.

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.

Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation.  If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to  zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.

SUNDAY MEETING — FEBRUARY 15 Heather Williams, H.W., M.

It Is Time NOW to Connect with Our INNATE Self! (Part 2) In this second part of my two-part series, I will focus on yhe creativity that is within us. Every human being is innately born with a creative seed within them. No one can tell you what it is. We each must listen to our heart, and we must find ways to draw out our creativity. I will give some exercises. This presentation will tell stories of how the Translation® technique can help us evolve and move forward in our lives. For more information, click here: https://www.theprosperos.org/prosperos-events/things-or-love-77l23 SUNDAY MEETING February 15, 2026 11:00 am Pacific / Noon Mountain / 1:00 pm Central / 2:00 pm Eastern NEW LINK…PLEASE USE THE JOIN BUTTON BELOW FOR MEETING Join Sunday Meeting By contribution.  Please click here to contribute: Contribute! Call In Information: One tap mobile  +16699006833,,81707590593# US (San Jose)  +16694449171,,81707590593# US  Meeting ID: 858 8286 3391 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdTAYZq0XQ

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