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Riding the Leopard

2026-05-13 · 12:53 UTC ·Not Boring ·17 min read

Brief

Packy McCormick's 'Riding the Leopard' is a spoken-to-written manifesto that stitches mysticism, philosophy, modern anecdotes, and information theory into a single practical claim: the purpose of human life is to expand the universe's repertoire of experience, and therefore people are morally and mathematically obligated to differentiate themselves. Drawing on the Upanishadic 'thou art that' and 'neti, neti', Joseph Campbell's 'Dionysus riding the leopard', Victor Frankl, Alan Watts, Rumi, and Alfred North Whitehead, McCormick argues that each unique, imperfect perspective lets an otherwise unobservable, perfect reality know and create itself.

He reinforces the argument with technical anchors: Claude Shannon's 1948 insight that information equals surprise and John Wheeler's 'It from Bit' participatory universe. Contemporary touchpoints — big AI and M&A deals (Sierra ~$15B, Anthropic ~$44B run rate and $1.5B vehicle, OpenAI $4B, Long Lake $6.3B AmEx travel purchase) and a reader's analysis of 200 sci‑fi novels (59% about meaning, 17% identity) — frame why this matters now. McCormick closes by likening human novelty to the valuable training signal in AI: laboratories pay for new data because only differentiated experience increases collective information. The practical implication for technologists and creatives is explicit: cultivate and contribute what only you can produce.

Why it matters

Packy McCormick delivered 'Riding the Leopard' as a talk on May 6, 2026 (published May 13, 2026) and framed the meaning of life as increasing the range and depth of experience; the essay was sent to his ~265,556 Not Boring subscribers and was first presented to ~80 people at The Mountain.

Key details

  • Core claim: 'differentiation is a moral obligation' — each person must become the irreducible, specific version of themselves so the universe gains new, surprising information that it could not otherwise obtain.
  • He connects this thesis to information theory: Claude Shannon's 1948 result that information is surprise (the 'bit') and John Wheeler's 'It from Bit' model, using them to argue that only imperfect, distinct observers create new information.
  • Packed contemporary context and data: McCormick opens by citing recent tech financings and deals (Sierra ~$15B raise; Anthropic ~$44B run rate and a $1.5B vehicle; OpenAI $4B fundraising; Long Lake’s $6.3B AmEx travel acquisition) and a reader's analysis of 200 sci‑fi books finding 59% concern meaning and 17% identity.
  • He synthesizes sources across traditions and modalities — Upanishads (neti neti, 'thou art that'), Rumi, Alan Watts, Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Chris Bache’s 73 LSD sessions, and the 'Telepathy Tapes' case of Asher — and parallels human novelty to the value labs place on novel training data for AI.
Cleaned source text

You are here to experience, or: why differentiation is a moral obligation.

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Riding the Leopard

May 13

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Welcome to the1,481 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join265,556 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Wednesday! Last week, I went out to LA to give a talk at my friend Grant Gittlin’s event, _The Mountain._ He asked me to do something different and weird, and I took the opportunity to pull a bunch of the ideas I’ve written in essays like _Means and Meaning_ , _The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff_ , _The Return of Magic_ , _Most Human Wins_ , and others into one cohesive ~philosophy. It was a good excuse to think about the meaning of life.

This is the talk. It was written to be spoken, so it may seem an oddly-written essay, but I hope it’s useful nonetheless, if for no other reason than that it makes you pause and wonder at the insane gift and responsibility we’ve all been given to experience and create in the world from our own unique points-of-view.

I was very nervous giving this talk to a room full of 80 people, but once I got through that, and a bunch of people told me that I should share it more broadly, I decided why not send it to 265,556 of my closest friends. I do think a lot of people are wondering what it is we’re here to do when machines can do more and more.

This is my best attempt yet, in what will be a lifetime full of attempts, to answer that question and then try to live the answer.

Let’s get to it.

Note: I’m sharing the first half with everyone and the whole thing with not boring world subscribers._ _Join us.

Transcript of a Talk Given at The Mountain on May 6, 2026

Thanks for inviting me, Grant, and to all of you for letting me fill your experience and attention for a little while.

What a week to get to talk to a room of technology people. Sierra just raised at $15 billion. Anthropic crossed a $44 billion run rate, and launched a new company with some huge funds that has $1.5 billion to deploy AI in big companies. OpenAI did the same thing but with $4 billion. Long Lake bought AmEx global travel for $6.3 billion.

All of which raises an important question: who gives a shit?

I mean that: why do we care?

Things are moving so fast that it’s worth thinking about what it is that we’re doing here.

Last night, a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM. She said she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer (she’s in remission now!), so she had been confronted with a question we’d all be facing: what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity (or in her case, the need to care about being productive at all)? To answer it, she analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books. Across all of those books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning. 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next, at just 17%.

Assume that companies will keep getting bigger and bigger, and growing faster and faster, and who cares… the thing we’ll be left solving for is meaning.

Luckily, that’s what I’d been planning to talk to you about.

When Grant asked me to talk and I asked Grant what he wanted me to talk about, he said, basically, “Whatever you want, the weirder the better. The line I really love from your recent essays is ‘You have the right to the work only but never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.’”

The funny thing about that line, which comes from the Bhagavad Gita, is that when I wrote about it, Venkatesh Rao, who is smarter, better read, and more Indian than me, replied, “This interpretation of the Gita verse is a bit of a stretch.”

After going back and forth in the comments, I think Venkatesh and I actually agree, but I am warning you that I am going to do a little bit more Indian-text-stretching and leaping in this talk to build a framework that I think is potentially useful and give it some ancient gravitas.

There is this category of questions I’ve been wrestling with, which I think a lot of people have been wrestling with recently, which is something along the lines of:

If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?

If we have means our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis?

What is technology for, anyway? What are we doing here?

In his 1978 essay collection, _The Unheard Cry for Meaning , _Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.”

Frankl, who wrote _Man’s Search for Meaning _about his experience finding meaning in the concentration camp, in the worst situation imaginable, writes three decades later about the lack of meaning in what could historically be described as the best situation imaginable.

This weird inverse relationship between material and spiritual wealth shows up over and over again.

“Again I tell you,” preached Jesus, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

The greater our means, the harder it might be to find meaning. The more we accomplish, the sooner we ask, “Cool, now what?”

It seems that we are in the middle of creating more technological, financial, and material wealth than we have at any other point in human history, thanks in part to some of the people in this room.

In order to avoid being the proverbial car-catching dogs, we’d better get prepared for what lies on the other side of all of those means. The world’s spiritual traditions were formed in times of scarcity. How are we supposed to handle all of this abundance? Is abundance bad, actually?

I’m going to propose a framework, drawing loosely on a broad set of sources including, but not limited to, the world’s major religions and a guy who took a lot of acid.

Here’s what I propose:

The meaning of life is to increase the range and depth of experience in the universe.

OK, so for the first stretch.

In the Upanishads, there is this concept of “Neti, neti,” or “Not this, not this.” It is a process of understanding what we are not so we can better understand what we are.

When you sit in silence and make yourself observe yourself, you notice things like:

“I am not my thoughts, because I can observe them come and go.”

“I am not my emotions, because I can watch them rise and fall.”

“I am not my bodily sensations, because I can feel them changing.”

The idea is to strip all of that away so that you know, gnostically, in your bones, that “you” are a process, an undefinable part of an incomprehensible whole. Which doesn’t mean that you are nothing.

What’s left is awareness, and at any moment, awareness is aware of something, experiencing something. You are awareness itself, and if you’ll allow me to stretch one step further, you are what you experience.

This probably isn’t a coincidence. Experiencing things might be the whole reason we’re here.

A few years ago, I started going down this rabbit hole that sounds insane when you list it out, from Dan Simmons’ sci-fi series _Hyperion Cantos _to Jesuit scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s _The Phenomenon of Man _to _The Telepathy Tapes _to _The Perennial Philosophy_ , Aldous Huxley’s book arguing that mystics in every tradition – Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist – have peered deeply into the nature of reality and come back saying basically the same thing.

The same thing is: thou art that.

This is a phrase that comes from the Upanishads, too. The idea is that the innermost self in you (Atman) and the ultimate reality of the universe (Brahman) are not separate things but the same thing.

If I am not my thoughts, not my emotions, not my body, what am I? Thou art that.

You are god, the universe, whatever, looking at itself through a particular set of eyes, experiencing itself through a particular consciousness.

If this is true, and it’s at least weird that so many of the world’s religions came to the same conclusion!, it means that every unique experience a human has is the universe experiencing itself in a way it couldn’t have otherwise.

This idea is both woo-sounding and load-bearing for the rest of the talk, so I’m going to reinforce it a little bit through some good ol’ fashioned appeal to authority.

Alan Watts said that “‘You’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.”

The 13th Century Sufi Poet Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

The Jesuit de Chardin said something similar. He held the heretical belief that evolution had a direction, towards more complexity, consciousness, and interiority. He asked, “What is the worth of human works if not to establish, in and by means of each one of us, an absolutely original center in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way?”

I can see that you want to get weirder. Let’s get weirder.

Chris Bache, a Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religion at Youngstown State University, conducted 73 high-dose LSD sessions on himself over the course of twenty years, going deeper and deeper, often painfully, to the point of tears and vomit, each time. From his later sessions, when he was getting really deep, he came back with the knowledge that “the essence of the individual is the essence of Totality, that Atman is Brahman.”

He portrays humans as incarnated aspects of a Creative Intelligence whose purpose is to awaken within physical existence, exercise controlled creativity, and thereby participate in the universe’s self-emergence.

Too weird? Let’s re-anchor on someone more traditionally credible.

Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician who wrote _Principia Mathematica_ with Bertrand Russell, spent his 60s building a metaphysics from scratch. “With the becoming and perishing of each actual occasion,” he wrote of moments, “a perspective on the universe is achieved that has never existed before.” In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the universe is not made of things, but of, and I quote, “drops of experience.”

So far, we have religious mystics of all traditions, a philosophical entertainer, a psychonaut, and a mathematician staring deep into the universe and reporting back essentially the same thing.

Why, though? If we are slivers of the universe experiencing itself, to what end?

Because through our imperfect experience, an infinite and perfect universe can know itself and create itself.

A couple of years ago, a podcast called _The Telepathy Tapes_ rocketed to #1 on the podcast charts. The host, Ky Dickens, had heard stories of non-verbal autistic kids who were able to communicate telepathically, and on the podcast, she interviewed a lot of them and their parents and ran experiments to test their abilities.

The thing that got me was a conversation with one of the kids, named Asher, who said, through a verbal woman named Jess, that he visits a place called the Realms to access information on any topic, which sounds crazy except for the fact that the kids know things about people they’ve never met that they couldn’t possibly know, and understand languages they were never taught and which their parents don’t speak.

Explaining the Realms, Asher said:

> _It ’s all parts of our soul exploring consciousness in different ways, and we’re basically building up huge amounts of information.

> _Every new thought we have, every new idea we have is new information. And that way, we ’re expanding the cosmos because each new piece of information that we come up with then goes into this library of his and becomes available for everybody else. But we have to get this knowledge through direct experience in 3D life.

This is something that comes up again and again, too: that God or the universe, omniscient and omnipotent as it is, needs imperfect beings to experience things to sample the full range. There are no stakes if you know how things will play out, no sacrifice if you can just fix it.

There’s this great book by William Egginton called _The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality_ , in which the author examines the ultimate nature of reality from the perspective of the author, the quantum physicists, and the philosopher. All three came to the same conclusion:

To observe anything, you need distinctions — between here and there, before and after, this and that. Without those gaps, there’s nothing to observe. A timeless, spaceless, perfect unity would be unobservable. Perfection can’t know itself. Only finite, imperfect conditions make experience possible.

Our job, then, cosmically, is to be limited, imperfect things having experiences on behalf of something too perfect and limitless to be able to.

Which was kind of the point of Jesus, right? Christianity’s deepest claim - that God became man, the infinite became finite - is the same claim the other traditions are making, from a different angle.

Jesus even had his own version of thou art that: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

In the _Gospel of Thomas_ , discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you have nothing within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.” Interpretations range from the gnostic - if you recognize and bring forth the divine light within, you will return to source - to the psychological.