His pitch deck has fourteen slides. Slide one is the company mission. Slides two through fourteen are TAM calculations. The product does not exist.

Every November, my nephew arrives at Thanksgiving with a new company, a new valuation, and the same Allbirds. This year it was 'SynthMail' — an AI that writes your emails for you and then reads the AI-written responses from the people you emailed, who are also using SynthMail. At no point in this workflow does a human read anything. He described this as 'removing friction from communication.' I asked him what communication meant if no one read it. He said I was 'thinking too linearly.'

The company has twelve employees. Four are engineers. Two are designers. Six have the title 'Head of' something. The CTO is twenty-three and lists 'prompt engineering' as a core competency on his LinkedIn, which is like listing 'asking questions' as a martial art. They raised $18 million in a round led by a fund whose thesis, as far as I can tell, is 'what if software, but again.'

I have a PhD from MIT. I spent six years building interpretability tools for neural networks. I published in NeurIPS, ICML, and Nature Machine Intelligence. My nephew dropped out of a coding bootcamp — not a university, a bootcamp — and was on the cover of Forbes '30 Under 30' for 'reimagining human-AI synergy.' The article described his product as 'revolutionary.' His product is a Chrome extension.

I was laid off in January. The institute said they were 'restructuring around applied outcomes.' My nephew offered me a role. The title was 'VP of Responsible Innovation,' which is a title that exists so that when Congress asks 'do you have someone responsible for this?' the company can say yes. The salary was $90,000. My nephew makes $400,000 and does not know what a transformer is.

He will be at Thanksgiving again. He will have a new company. My mother will ask me why I can't be more like him. I will eat my turkey.