This week: a filmmaker who crawled into a prehistoric cave and came out with a philosophy, a researcher with 80 years of data on what actually makes life good, and a CEO who reversed a company-wide AI policy and explained exactly why.
Different fields. Same underlying question: what does it take to do work that holds up?
MENTOR SPOTLIGHT
Werner Herzog
Filmmaker and documentarian who has spent six decades following obsession into extreme places
Yesterday, Werner Herzog sat down with critic Tim Grierson to talk about Cave of Forgotten Dreams , his 2010 documentary shot inside Chauvet Cave in southern France. The film is being re-released in IMAX with a 6K restoration — 16 years after Herzog and a tiny crew were granted rare access to paint and charcoal drawings made 36,000 years ago. He reflected on what it meant to film art that old, and what 3D could do that a flat frame could not.
Herzog's career is a useful object lesson in creative stubbornness. He walked 600 miles across Germany in winter to visit a dying friend. He dragged a 320-ton steamship over a real mountain in the Amazon to make Fitzcarraldo . He didn't do these things for efficiency. He did them because he believed the physical act of suffering for a project changes what the project becomes. Whether or not you agree, it's hard to argue with the results.
The Chauvet re-release is a reminder that the work you make at your most serious can outlast almost any trend. Those cave paintings are 36,000 years old. Herzog's film about them is now old enough to drive. Both are still being watched. Most content made this week will be forgotten by next Tuesday.
If you're 25 to 35 and trying to build something with a real point of view, Herzog is one of the few working artists who will tell you, without softening it, that the world is mostly chaos and your job is to make something anyway. That's not pessimism. That's a starting point.
IN THE NEWS
Robert Waldinger Robert Waldinger was quoted this week in a piece titled "Health And Happiness Go Hand In Hand," published April 11 on Awaken.com, summarizing key findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. He made a point worth sitting with: roughly 40% of your happiness is within your control. The rest is genetics, circumstance, luck — things you can't move. But that 40% is still a lot of room. His consistent message, backed by 80-plus years of longitudinal data, is that the single biggest factor in that controllable slice is the quality of your close relationships — not income, not status, not productivity systems.
Luis von Ahn Luis von Ahn appeared on the Silicon Valley Girl podcast around April 13, addressing a policy reversal at Duolingo. The company had started evaluating employees partly based on their use of AI tools — then pulled back. Von Ahn was direct about it: the policy didn't fit in all cases, and they overcorrected. That kind of public course-correction is rare from a founder-CEO. It's worth paying attention to, because the pressure to appear decisive usually wins over the willingness to say "we got that wrong." The underlying question he's wrestling with — how do you push a company toward AI adoption without making it feel punitive — is one most organizations will face in the next two years.
QUICK WISDOM
"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness." — Werner Herzog Herzog said this in an interview — it sounds bleak, but he treats it as a reason to create urgently, not to give up.
"The good life is not a place to arrive at, it's a way of traveling." — Robert Waldinger From his book The Good Life — a direct challenge to the idea that you'll feel settled once you hit the next milestone.
"Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted." — Luis von Ahn He said this about his early human-computation research — the same thinking that led to CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and eventually Duolingo.
FROM THE BLOG
AI Mentor App vs. Human Mentor Human mentors are scarce, expensive, and hard to schedule — AI mentors are available at 2am when you actually have the question. This post breaks down what each is genuinely better at, so you can decide what you actually need. Read it here.
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— Jesse Krim Founder, Get Mentors