And

Formally, if two propositions $p$ and $q$ are mutually exclusive, then $p\land q$ is a contradiction. In probability, events $A$ and $B$ are mutually exclusive if and only if $P(A \cap B) = 0$; on a Venn diagram, their intersection is empty.

Used as a constraint, this principle is useful in mathematics. Constraints act like the fulcrum of a lever, giving you a fixed point to move the problem. Outside mathematics, mutual exclusivity creeps into everyday thinking and dialogue, not as a helpful constraint but as a limiting dogma.

Hang tight.

We all know the TV archetypes: the nerd, the cool kid, the athlete, the pretty girl, the weirdo. The script implies exclusions.

• The athlete is cool but not smart like the nerd
• The nerd is smart but not extraverted like the pretty girl
• The pretty girl is popular but not as smart as the nerd or as fast as the athlete

The same pattern shows up in business narratives: a car is either affordable or luxurious, a restaurant is either fast and cheap or slow and gourmet, an airliner is either economical and subsonic or premium and supersonic, an AI model is either small and less capable or large and very capable.

Listen to the way we talk about time: be with your girlfriend or your friends, work hard or take a holiday. The keyword is “or”. In English it is usually exclusive. If its $A$ or $B$, you must choose. Should “or” dominate our vocabulary to this extent? Or should we ask, ¿por qué no los dos?

Ambitious people often recognise themselves as a superposition of types. Why be only a nerd when you can also be an athlete (Myron Rolle, John Urschel)? Why be the pretty popular girl when you could also be a genius founder (Bridgit Mendler)? Outliers, yes, but they prove the point: mastery can be plural. That means rejecting false mutual exclusions and embracing mutual inclusion. It means swapping “or” for “and” where it matters (with caution at cocktail bars).

Consider cars. If manufacturers truly optimised for “and”, we would see more affordable luxury. It is hard, not impossible. Precision manufacturing and scale make it feasible. This is something Elon figured out quite early at Tesla where he bet that an automated, tightly controlled assembly line could deliver a premium feel at lower cost. In his book, he was quoted saying something like, “why can’t these electric cars come out with a Mercedes-Benz finish for half the cost?” The result was a mass-market car that often feels luxurious for the price. Any car company could chase similar outcomes with the same relentless pursuit of “and”. Everyone wants the product that has everything!

Consider food. The default is McDonald’s speed or fine dining quality. Why not fast and exceptional? Why can’t fast food taste as good as high end restaurant food? Again, it requires thinking at the edge. You have to source the highest quality ingredients, assemble them into an integrated dish and distribute all for an affordable price. This is what Travis Kalanick has in mind with CloudKitchens. Cooking can eventually become a hobby, if gourmet food becomes cheap and easy to mass distribute direct to consumer. Machines can be engineered to mix ingredients and warm food to make delicious dishes with minimal human interactions. If the productivity from the machine’s that don’t sleep offset the labour costs of traditional kitchens, quality becomes a choice, not a causality. If you could order custom gourmet from a robot kitchen at near-fast-food prices, you would trade the hour or two per day of cooking for something more valuable or fun, like flying your eVTOL around town.

Speaking of flying why can’t airlines pursue more mutual inclusions? You can either fly quickly or cheaply. The Concorde proved you could get from London to New York in less than 3.5 hours under Mach 2 speed. Sadly, it’s operators lived in a world where supersonic could be fast or economically viable but never both (maybe because it was a government sponsored project). Plus a tragic fatal crash that killed all on board didn’t help bolster demand. Boom is rewriting supersonic commercial flight with Overture. The Overture aircraft’s Symphony engine targets Mach 1.7, whilst less than the Concorde’s Mach 2, still roughly twice as fast as today’s airliners, with the benefit of curbing noise and fuel burn. The Olympus 593 engine onboard the Concorde needed afterburners for takeoff to punch through the transonic drag rise, creating very high noise. Symphony instead uses a medium-bypass turbofan with no afterburner to actually adhere to global noise standards whilst staying fast and efficient. Noise was a such a big deal it restricted the Concorde to only transatlantic routes that didn’t fly overland. This combination of sound engineering decisions (pardon the pun) inspired by the lessons learnt from the Concorde have a high probability of unlocking affordable supersonic travel from London to New York in one sitting of Oppenheimer… whilst eating gourmet fast-food made from a robot kitchen.

Now consider AI. Today the trade-off seems stark: very large models like GPT-5 with expert-level capability using somewhere in the range of $10^{7}$-$10^{11}$ parameters or a smaller variant like Mistral’s Small-3.1 with 24 billion parameters but far less intelligent. For embedded use, especially AR glasses, on-device is non-negotiable. To get E.D.I.T.H-style assistants that respond in under ~200 ms (natural human gaps in conversation) without interrupting conversation, we need expert-level intelligence at the edge, not a stream of hallucinations in your ear. The winner of the AR glasses race will be the first to deploy an expert-level AI running locally. I’m bullish on Sesame Labs, their voice demo induced goosebumps. Hopefully they finesse the hardware.

Being an “and-yes” person is liberating and banning the word “or” from the vocabulary feels like unlocking a new ability in the skill tree.

So goodbye $\neg(p \land q)$ and hello $p\land q$.

Let success be a function of how many successive “and”s you can chain next to what you do.