Garry Tan: "Personal AGI Is How You Stay Under Your Own Power"
In a Nutshell
Garry Tan argues that personal AGI—your own agent running on your infrastructure with your context, memory, and skill files—is how individuals maintain ownership of their cognitive abilities in an age of agents. The core mechanism is building a personal library of markdown files (220k pages in his case) plus skill files that capture your processes, then wiring them to agents so they compound daily while you sleep. This setup produces 400x productivity gains, lets one founder run companies that break old revenue-per-person math, and ensures your judgment stays yours rather than being extracted into corporate repos.
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The internet calls Garry Tan one of the most AI psychotic people online. He begins his talk with the story of Baruch Spinoza, one of the most cancelled men in history. In 1929, a New York rabbi challenged Einstein by telegram asking if he believed in God, requesting an answer in 50 words. Einstein answered in 25 words: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind."
On July 27, 1656, in Amsterdam, Spinoza was 23 years old and a member of a tight-knit Sephardic Jewish community. The elders excommunicated him with the most violent curse the community ever produced, stating he was cursed by day and by night, when he lies down and when he rises up. Nobody could speak to him, trade with him, come within four cubits of him, or read anything he writes. This ban uniquely had no repentance clause among the roughly 40 bans the community issued that century, and it remains technically in force today.
Spinoza's crime was evil opinions and expressing forbidden thoughts. His punishment was complete deletion from the community. Before the excommunication, the community tried to buy him off with a thousand guilders a year, serious money at the time, requiring only that he show up at synagogue occasionally and keep his mouth shut. In founder terms, they offered him a salary to stop building. He refused, saying he wanted truth, not comfort, and would not accept it for 10,000 guilders.
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