Come With Me, George
The most valuable person in any thinking life is the one who argues back. For most of history, finding one was pure luck. AI just changed that — and almost everyone is wasting it.
In the 1980s, at the University of Miami, the chairman of the geology department was an Italian named Cesare Emiliani. He had trained in Harold Urey’s lab at the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago. He had founded an entire scientific field — paleoceanography, the study of ancient oceans. And he carried the lowest ego of any man of his stature I have ever met.
A friend introduced us. We fell into conversation — and about an hour in, he looked at me, a student, a nobody, and made me a promise. George, he said, I am going to make you a renaissance man. I was a Cuban kid out of Las Vegas with a head full of math. I had no idea what he had seen in that hour. But from that sentence on, I was spellbound.
And then he kept the promise. He would catch me on campus — come with me, George — and I would go: into administrative meetings, onto research cruises, into arguments about Dante and the right way to brew beer. He chose my courses himself. Never the survey classes — always the specific ones, at whatever level, each picked because it held something he had decided I needed. Renaissance art, but the Northern Renaissance, because the world already talked enough about the South. Literature here, philosophy there. Corner by corner, he walked me through an education he had designed one selection at a time.
It took me years to understand the shape of the gift. The courses built the range. The arguments taught me to use it. And underneath both was the thing he gave most freely: resistance — a mind that pushed back on anything, from anywhere, without ever needing to win.
Every good thinker I have known found their best ideas the same way: out loud, against someone. My father’s card table worked like this — questions, hand after hand, that made you say what you actually knew. Emiliani’s promise had a pedigree. The Renaissance itself made its masters no other way. Michelangelo filled his studio with apprentices partly for the extra hands, but mostly for the argument: drafts handed back, choices challenged, the work sharpened by voices willing to push against the master’s.
And here is the brutal fact about that kind of interlocutor: finding one is luck. Patient, deep, curious, egoless, available — almost nobody gets one. Most people think alone their whole lives and call it thinking.
Then, in the space of about two years, the scarcest resource in intellectual life became abundant.
Anyone can now sit down at midnight, on any subject, across from a tireless interlocutor that never gets bored, never gets wounded, and never needs to win. The thing Emiliani gave one lucky student — resistance, offered generously — is sitting in a hundred million pockets.
And what is almost everyone doing with it? Asking it to fetch. Write the email. Summarize the article. Give me the answer. We were handed the greatest sparring partner ever built, and we are using it as a vending machine.
An answer machine makes you faster. A foil makes you better. They are different products.
The foil makes you say the thing out loud — and half of clarity is being forced to state your position instead of gesturing at it. It argues the side you are avoiding. It catches the step you skipped. It will not let you know what I mean stand in for meaning it. Try it against a story you are writing, a business you are building, a decision you cannot move. The mechanism is the same everywhere: the thinking that survives the pushback is the thinking you can trust.
A few weeks ago I handed it a belief I have held for forty years — one of the load-bearing ones — with a single instruction: attack this. It was ruthless, and it was useful. It found a test I had built that no possible evidence could fail. It caught me explaining the people who disagree with me instead of answering them. It noticed that one of my premises came from a physics the physicists retired a century ago. The belief survived — leaner, standing only on what it could actually defend. What fell was not the position. It was the certainty I had never earned.
Which belief? A story for another day. The point is what the arguing did. It didn’t change my mind. It made my mind earn its keep.
I should say plainly that I use these tools this way nearly every day — several of them, from several companies. I argue with them about my work, my drafts, my decisions. They get things wrong, too; I have caught them overreaching just as they have caught me. That is not a flaw in the practice. A sparring partner doesn’t have to be right to make you better. It has to make you check.
I also refuse to let any of them write in my voice, and the distinction is the whole point. Michelangelo’s apprentices drew, argued, pushed back — and the work that left the studio was unmistakably his. The apprentices sharpen the master’s hand. They never replace it.
Emiliani is gone now. I don’t know whether he ever made me a renaissance man. I know he made me someone who thinks out loud, against resistance — and I know no machine replaces the part of him that knew me, the part that picked my next course before I knew I needed it. But the other part — the generous resistance, the arguing without needing to win — is now waiting in your pocket, ready to be asked for something better than a summary.
The next time you open one of these tools, notice which thing you reach for: the vending machine, or the sparring partner. One gives you an answer. The other gives you back your own mind, sharpened.
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Holding the Edge is about how mathematicians see the world — without the math. A new essay every couple of weeks.
I’m also on LinkedIn, where I post these and think out loud between essays.