Last Friday I sat in a room at a Silicon Slopes event listening to Jeff Burningham talk about his book, The Last Book Written by a Human. A mutual friend had recommended the book to me. I went expecting to hear another tech leader's take on AI risk.

I was pleasantly surprised.

Not at the polish or the pitch — at the message Jeff is evangelizing and the type of conversation his book is opening. Because I think it's a really important conversation, and it's exactly in line with what we're building at The Liminal Leap.

Jeff talked about his own journey — the truth about what's happened to him across an ongoing awakening. This is real, from a man who co-founded a $5 billion real estate firm, started and invested in companies valued at over a billion dollars combined, ran for governor — and then realized that at the so-called top of the mountain, there was just a howling wind. Nothing fulfilling from doing more and having more.

Jeff calls this an ego death. I have other language for it, and I've experienced what he's talking about. I can feel his genuine concern for what's coming for humanity.

If you've been there, you know the type of experience Jeff is describing. If you haven't, his book will give you a sense of what that freefall feels like — and what becomes possible on the other side.

Before I go any further: go read this book. I read the entire thing in one day. The conversation about AI has been dominated by techno-optimist hype on one side and existential dread on the other — and I think most thoughtful people are exhausted by both. Jeff brings something neither extreme offers — heart, vulnerability, and the authority of someone who's actually walking through the type of transformation he's saying the world needs and calling other people toward. If you only take one thing from this article, make it that.

Why This Book Makes Sense to Me

I keep coming back to something in my own observations: AI amplifies whatever we bring to it. Presence, fragmentation, clarity, chaos — it doesn't filter. It accelerates. As machines become more intelligent, the reflection they cast back on us gets sharper and less forgiving. We start to see our divisions, our greed, our compulsive need to optimize everything — including our own worth. And we have a choice: look away, or go deeper.

Jeff frames this through the hero's journey — disruption, reflection, transformation, evolution — and makes a call for a shift from human doing to human being. We are human beings, not human doings. And in this society, we're so identified with our work, our output, and our achievement that in an AI world — where the machine is suddenly the thing that's productive and does all of the work — it's an identity crisis. Who are we if we're not our output?

If that question doesn't land for you yet, pay attention to what happens the next time you have a free afternoon with nothing to produce. Notice what your body does. That restlessness, that pull to check something, optimize something, prove something — that's what Jeff is talking about. And that's what AI is about to surface for millions of people who've never had to sit with it before.

It's really important that a venture capitalist with his track record is saying this. In public, with his name on it. Because we need people who have walked the achievement path to its logical conclusion and discovered that it doesn't arrive anywhere that matters. That's encouraging to me.

I've gone through my own identity-level transition — from achiever to realizing there needs to be a turn inward. A focus on presence and tapping into the deepest parts of ourselves. The real human side. The part that requires you to stop performing long enough to feel what's actually happening inside of you.

And in a world where we're outmatched from a cognitive perspective — through pure thinking, ones and zeros — the difference for a human being is actually in the nervous system, in the body, and in the heart.

From Inspiration to Capacity

High performers can hear an invitation like Jeff's and something in them recognizes what he's saying. They feel it. They know it's true. They know that achievement is empty. But then within weeks, whatever opened in them closes back up again.

This isn't because they lack courage. It's because the transition from "I am what I do" to "I am something deeper" isn't primarily an intellectual, mind-based event. It's something that has to land in the nervous system and this type of transformation takes time. You can understand this invitation cognitively all the way through and still have your body running the old achievement operating system at full speed.

I'm speaking to this because I've seen it in my own journey. I lived twenty-five years of chronic fight-or-flight nervous system activation, maintained through achieving and doing — an identity wired for performance that showed up as a successful sales career. But understanding the problem — realizing I had all the things I thought would make me happy and wasn't deeply fulfilled, recognizing that a turn inward needed to happen — understanding all of that didn't shift anything. That took years of intensive inner work, somatic work, and it's still unfolding and nowhere near complete. My nervous system is still rewiring itself.

Jeff's book is really powerful at sparking that initial realization — a flash of recognition, an experience of seeing yourself clearly. At The Liminal Leap, we think of that moment as the beginning of the real journey. Because there's a difference between having an awakening state experience and developing the stable capacity to live day to day, in your waking reality, from what you glimpsed. It's the difference between visiting a country and living there.

The human doing we're so identified with lives in our physiology, in our nervous system. Telling someone whose nervous system is built around constant activation to just "be present" is like telling someone with a broken leg to go for a run. The instruction might be totally correct, but the capacity in the body isn't there yet. The path from doing to being runs through the body, through nervous system regulation, through the slow work of transformation and building a new baseline.

I view this as some of the most important work for humanity over the coming decade.

The Mirror as Daily Practice

Jeff's book opens this conversation at the civilization level — we look into technology and see ourselves reflected back. This is important. And it's not just individual — it's a collective upshift.

But if AI amplifies whatever we bring to it, then the question becomes — what are we bringing?

Here's what that looks like in practice. Someone sits down with AI and asks it to write their emails faster, organize their tasks, optimize their morning routine. Nothing wrong with that. But someone else sits down with the same tool and asks it to help them understand why they keep avoiding a conversation they know they need to have. Or they notice that the way they're prompting — impatient, controlling, demanding quick answers — is the same way they show up to everything else in their life. The mirror is right there. Most people walk past it.

AI will free people up from being defined by their productivity — but what do we do with that freedom? At The Liminal Leap, we see that AI, when engaged with presence and skill, can actually accelerate inner development. It becomes the mirror Jeff is talking about — not as metaphor, but as daily practice.

And here's what I want to be clear about: the more we use AI to go inward, the more we need human-to-human interaction around the same territory. This isn't a replacement for being together — it's a reason to be together more. The kind of capacities human beings are being asked to develop don't emerge in isolation. They emerge in relationship.

The Conversation That's Coming

I'm really excited about the conversation Jeff is opening. More and more people are going to be talking about these complex changes moving through the world and through humanity. I'm optimistic about where it goes — and there's also real risk.

Different people are at different places in their own development. So how do we give people experiences that meet them where they're at and invite them forward? You can't hand someone a peak experience and expect lasting transformation. The call — the art — is designing containers that stretch people from wherever they are toward where they're going, without breaking them, boring them, or forcing them to move faster than they're available to.

That's what we're building at The Liminal Leap. Jeff wrote the book that opens the door. The question now is what we build on the other side of it.

— Matt

If you've read the book, leave a review on Amazon, Audible, or Goodreads. Jeff wrote this to start a conversation — your voice is part of it.

This is the territory we explore at The Liminal Leap — what it actually takes to develop the human capacities this moment requires. If that inquiry matters to you, subscribe to stay connected.