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Hey, today's guest is Chris Dixon, who is a venture capitalist and the author of this book, Read, Write, Own.
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We talk about the future of writing, where all of this is going, so that you can start thinking about your career, what it is that you want to do as a writer, and start thinking about how do I make money, how do I position myself well for the future.
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It was through writing on the internet that he became a big name in Silicon Valley.
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You've probably heard ideas like come for the tools, stay for the network.
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What nerdy people are doing now is what the smartest people will be doing in 10 years. He coined those terms.
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He was one of those OG bloggers back in the day, and he must have written 300, 500 blog posts, had a bunch of conversations, built and sold two companies, and then he took a step back, and he said, "I have something important to say, something valuable to share with the world, and I want to turn that into a book."
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So, hey, let's get to it.
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Here's my conversation with Chris Dixon.
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Chris, you're somebody who stands out as a particular kind of writer, somebody who's written literally hundreds of blog posts, blog posts that really influenced me, thought about these things for decades, and then packaged the best ideas that came out of the things that you wrote, the comments, the conversations, and then turned that into a book.
1:14
Tell me about that process.
1:14
So, you know, I've been sort of interested in computers my whole life.
1:18
Um I ended up um going a little off the path and and and actually studying philosophy in college and getting actually getting a master's degree, where I did a lot of writing as part of that program, and um um then in the early 2000s, got excited about the internet and and started a career there, where I became an entrepreneur.
1:40
I started two internet startups, and um since then have have switched to investing in internet startups.
1:46
Um along the way, I um I think around 2008 or so, decided, you know, I I felt like I was Well, one, that was sort of the the for those who were active on the internet, that was sort of the beginning of middle of the rise of social media.
2:01
And so people were just sort of getting more active online and Twitter was starting to grow and blogging was a thing and and I thought that was exciting just from an internet trends point of view.
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Um and then I just felt like I had a lot to say.
2:14
Um and so I started blogging and like a lot of things probably like I think for my first I don't know, almost a year, I don't think anyone was reading it.
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So like it was on it's like a lot of these activities like you have to be doing it cuz you actually enjoy it because there was there was no like purpose beyond that because no one's reading it.
2:30
Um I think it was actually one day Fred Wilson, I don't know if folks know him, he's a he's a long-time blogger, venture capitalist who's a good friend and incred you know, incredibly smart.
2:41
Um and had a following and one day linked to me cuz that was sort of the thing that happened, you know, you you'd hope someone would link to you and and uh he linked to me and I started getting some traffic and then I had I had a comment back then you'd have blogs with comment sections and I had this sort of community that I would be very active in responding to them.
2:57
Um and it really became a fun thing.
2:57
I actually thought of it as like I I tried to do I think about a blog post a week and the way I would think about it is so I believe that especially on the internet people are very sensitive to authenticity and that if you don't if you write something that isn't authentic, they can tell.
3:14
I don't know, maybe I'm being overly optimistic.
3:15
And so my kind of personal challenge was uh to summarize an interesting thing I learned that week.
3:26
And to and so sort of I'd go through the week, I'd hopefully have interesting conversations with people.
3:32
You know, if I'm you know, if I'm talking to interesting people and I'm thinking, I would hopefully have like one new idea.
3:39
And then I would at the end of the week or sometime like that, um try to write that idea down.
3:43
And it was very short, you know, very short, often a couple paragraphs. Sometimes I go longer.
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It was weird thing where I'd learned that like probably the sweet spot was like four paragraphs and if I went too long it would actually get sort of less attention and too short you probably couldn't really state an idea.
3:59
So it's really kind of like a concept like it'd be like one concept.
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Um and um and that was just a really I mean it was really fun.
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Um it was just like a you know kind of like learning in public I would say.
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One thing that you're really good at that I would have learned from you is one-liners.
4:14
Come for the tools stay for the network.
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The things that the basically the nerds are doing now the smartest people will be doing in 10 years.
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And that's what you would do you'd find a concept a phrase a sentence.
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big thing starts out looking like a toy. That was like a big one.
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like eight of those and you would focus on that. You'd write that.
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And the thing that helped you was I don't think you tried to be too fancy.
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You know you weren't like going down the lane doing some like crazy 360 through the legs slam dunk.
4:42
You're just like dropping it in every single week.
4:44
And it worked well for you.
4:46
You know I think I do think a lot of that was to do to my like what I was doing during the week though.
4:50
Like like I remember come for the tools stay for the network I was like in a meeting and I was talking to an entrepreneur and I was explaining kind of this you know come for the tools stay for the network as a as a strategy for building networks um for kind of getting adoption to net for networks.
5:00
getting adoption to net for networks. So then go into that if people want but um and I remember just having it was through you know sort of through the the kind of the the the the you know the yeah just the activity of
5:10
having lots of conversations and at one point said I said that and I was like hey you know maybe I should call a blog post that and like um so I think it wouldn't have happened had I been sort of just sitting in a chair thinking of what's a clever phrase or something right? It kind of came through
5:23
It kind of came through intellectual sparring.
5:25
And look I one of the really I'm very fortunate in that the job I do is basically involves talking to smart people and so you're just sort of constantly refining ideas and building them right?
5:37
And so and and so I think that's somewhere where it came from.
5:39
Um and then you know blogging has its nice the nice thing about blogging I think people kind of underestimate is when you write something kind of boring or dumb maybe no one it's like it's sort of it's almost like a self-regulating machine cuz like no one pays attention to it.
5:52
So people are like you have all these great phrases.
5:54
Well, I wrote 500 blog posts and like 10 went viral and people remember those and then you're like you came you know there were 490 where I probably missed right you know, but it's sort of this self right it's a self-regulating in the sense that those don't get as popular and You were writing probably every at least around October 2010. Yeah.
6:14
Maybe 2015 like those years sometime through then you were writing maybe every 10 to 14 days. You were writing a lot.
6:20
Probably that's probably right. Yeah.
6:20
I thought it was more like a week once a week but maybe it's yeah.
6:23
I know that I counted at one point there were 500 blog posts over whatever the math is on that over uh um four-year period of You were writing a lot.
6:32
And then kind of switched unfortunately to Twitter and life's jobs and life and everything else took you know You have this interesting idea about how Twitter is almost unserious and that if people could take writing more seriously in the way that you were doing it there's so much low-hanging fruit here.
6:47
Yeah, I know I so I let me qualify that.
6:49
Like I think you know I I I think it's generally been a very positive thing that um the internet has democratized publishing that anyone has can now put something on the internet and I think things like Twitter have been important that they made it really easy.
7:05
Like the blogging when I did it you had to fiddle with like a website and RSS and there was just all this kind of stuff and then you need to build an audience and like you know one of the benefits of these modern social networks is they do kind of sometimes try to help you at least initially get you know through the algorithmic feed get an audience.
7:20
So there I don't want to be like overly negative but I do think that that um there is a lot of value in in sort of longer form writing and and both in the sense of just as a way to communicate ideas but I also think just career-wise like in my industry in the tech industry I think that a kind of a hack that is surprise to me is very surprisingly underused.
7:45
Let's say you're a, you know, early in your career person who wants to who's interested in artificial intelligence and you want to build a profile as a kind of a thinker in that area.
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To me the the shortest and um uh you can do I think in the course of 2 months you can become like a high-profile person if you write a bunch of interesting blog posts on the topic.
8:08
I don't think that happens this in the same way when you write like just a few sentences on Twitter.
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And I think that that the ease of social media has lulled a lot of people into thinking that a video on TikTok or a tweet is the right way to kind of go out and share share their knowledge.
8:25
Um when in fact, you know, the kind of stuff you talk about on the show and just, you know, actual writing of like a lot of ideas just simply cannot be stated in um short form in the right way.
8:38
Like to to really kind of get the concept through.
8:39
Um I I thought when I was blogging you know, in that period, so like I guess 15 years ago now, I thought I was just sort of had at the frontier of something and that of course like because it so dramatically accelerated my career to to blog cuz it just suddenly, you know, I was in New York which you know, the tech world is like at the time was minor leagues, right?
9:02
Everything was in the Bay Area.
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Um I just, you know, I had a startup that I had sold but it was a security startup.
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It wasn't super well known.
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Um and and through blogging was just able to, you know, sort of become part of the top Silicon Valley world, eventually joined, you know, a big Silicon Valley firm and moved California.
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Um and I contribute almost almost all of that to to writing.
9:25
Um and so I assumed I was going to be at the front at the frontier and then of course everyone else would figure this out and that it would just be this thing that people do and then like you building your career and your writing.
9:34
Like this is just like the way to to to show to stand out in an intellectual field, right?
9:39
Um but it it surprises me that it really hasn't happened but happened to the extent that I expected it to.
9:42
I mean, blogging is kind of the way you know um talking about it before the before the video.
9:49
Um you know, there's like Tyler Cowen and sort of these old school of Fred Wilson and there's like some people that still kind of blog, but for the most part like that that art form of like writing a page um or two pages um had is certainly isn't as popular as one would expect given just how the explosion of social media, I guess.
10:12
Yeah, when I look at your writing, there's a real simplicity to it, a real practicality.
10:18
And I'm curious to hear how much of that is from your background as an engineer knowing languages like Python and then how much of it is from the the kind of writing that you did at Columbia. Yeah.
10:31
I I look I think a lot of it is um so I so I had a very I had I had a fantastic I loved uh my experience in college.
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For me it was just sort of this like awakening.
10:41
Um and you know, in in retrospect, I don't think I knew how to write.
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It's funny my parents were English were English professors and so you'd think I would know how to write, but but um and they used to make me write in things.
10:52
But but uh but actually when I look at it like one of the things they did in in college was they they would go through with a red pen and just be like every little thing.
11:00
And one of the particular things they would do that I remember very clearly was they would write pretentious they had some shorthand for pretentious diction.
11:07
Like whenever you chose a word that that could have been simpler.
11:09
This might have been a philosophy specific thing.
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Like choose the simpler word.
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love to get crazy with that.
11:16
No, and like and if you if you read the best philosophy um I in my opinion um you know, just like take Bertrand Russell or something like one of these kind of classic philosophers or um or or um any of the um you know, I I did analytic philosophy.
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So you know, that's sort of for those who don't know, like philosophy kind of forked, you know, around I don't know, 1850s or something and they're sort of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and then a bunch of modern ones.
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Then there's the continental philosophy, which is like, you know, Hegel and the existentialists and things.
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So, I was on the kind of more of the science and philosophy of mind and language and all that.
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And and the in that's that world the there there was a real um emphasis on simplicity, economy.
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I think of a lot of my favorite philosophy books and essays are really short.
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There's almost no jargon.
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There's almost no footnotes.
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It's just like a pure like there's just a new like the best philosophy to my mind is like just a new idea.
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It's just a brand new idea.
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And once you express the idea, it's like, "Oh, wow, that's a new idea."
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And then like maybe you tease out the implications of the idea, but that's it.
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It's just like a new idea, right?
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Like you're in the idea business. You're producing ideas.
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You're sort of you think of it as a business, your supply chain, it's like you're at the mouth of the river.
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You're creating the new ideas and then downstream people can take those ideas and implement them in various ways.
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But like real philosophy is like idea production, right? It's a nice word.
12:35
Um anyway, so that was very influential on me.
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And and I and I always thought of like anytime, you know, there's a thing people do with their write.
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Like it's funny like a lot of people like they speak very well.
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But then suddenly they write and it becomes formal.
12:46
Have you seen this thing?
12:48
I was reviewing uh job description that some people on our team at Right of Passage wrote yesterday.
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And one of the things I've started doing is I review in Google Docs.
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And a lot of times my comments in Google Docs are harsh.
13:00
So, what I'll do is then I'll make a Loom video after.
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I got this from Tim Ferriss said he did this when he came on the show.
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And I was like, "I'm doing that."
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And the number one piece of feedback I said was, "You're writing like you're trying to write.
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You're not writing like you're talking to me.
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Just pretend that this person is right in front of you and you're trying to describe what they're doing at the job in five to eight bullet points.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and just be super direct, super clear, and don't type this.
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Just go for a walk and just say it.
13:34
very funny how that It's like it's almost like Yeah, it's almost like if you're not trained It's It takes training to write like you speak.
13:41
It's It's a It's Do you know the Miles Davis line on this?
13:43
He says jazz musician, he says sometimes it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself. That's great, yeah.
13:53
So, that's that's perfect, yeah.
13:54
No, that That's That's right.
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I think um And so that, you know, I don't know.
13:58
So, I For me like it just Yes, it took a long time to learn to play like myself, to speak, you know, to speak in a I mean, obviously you In In good writing you do it better, right?
14:07
I'm like the things I'm saying now like they aren't structured perfectly, they aren't, you know, so you're sort of the best version of yourself, right?
14:13
The best The best version of the way you speak and has your voice and things.
14:17
Does engineering factor into this because this to me is one of Silicon Valley's big contributions to writing in general is simplicity, clarity, directness? Yeah, maybe.
14:25
I think yeah, I think there is this In engineering, right?
14:29
There is this like there there is a emphasis on economy. Mhm.
14:35
You know, economy, modularity.
14:37
I mean, my book my My editor would He said one of the eccentric things about my book is that well, I chunked it into three to four So, it's meant to be read cover to cover.
14:49
Um but you can read it in three to four page chunks, which is Engineers would call modularity.
14:55
You write like it's like each thing sort of stands alone.
14:57
Um and also he thought it was eccentric, my editor, that I sometimes in many places will say uh refer to other sections in a Like a hyperlink.
15:04
Like a hyper thing, sure.
15:07
Which I thought about removing, but he thought it would end up I thought it was nice because that way you could jump around and see it, but um Uh yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know.
15:14
I I I I can't really I think for myself, I mean, like it is symbol manipulation.
15:18
I think one of the things I like through the process of writing the book I think one of the interesting things for me writing the book was and I'm guessing this is true for a lot of other people is that my my ear, my editing ability was far ahead of my writing ability. Huh.
15:31
Is that not the case for everybody else? Say more about that. That's interesting.
15:36
like and this is always been I I think I've closed the gap over the course of practicing.
15:40
What I mean is um I could I think for a long time I mean I've anyone who I read a lot and I assume you do.
15:47
I assume most of viewers do and if you read a lot you you know, your ear knows that like this is good writing, this is bad writing and so like I have an ear I think I've had an ear for a long time to be able to say this is good bad writing bad writing.
15:57
As a writer my challenge has been I'll write something and I'll be like something is off but I don't know what it is, right?
16:06
Like I found that to be my and it therefore it was a very slow process writing like I'm talking about like when I blogged as an example.
16:12
Like I would rewrite these things and I'd be like why is this off?
16:16
And you know, and so one of the things that the like one of the things of actually writing a book that I found it dramatically improved on was fixing that feedback loop.
16:25
Now when I see something's off I'm pretty quick at saying okay, wait what what is it that I'm hearing that's off and how do I fix it?
16:31
It's because of the you know, the the topic sentence is wrong, the clause is in the wrong place, the you know, the the word choice is wrong.
16:39
it's sort of like how you know what's wrong with all your friends' lives Yeah.
16:42
but you don't really know what's wrong with your life and sometimes you can just see other people's writing clearly. Yeah.
16:46
And I think that there's a there might even be an ego thing attached with your own writing because here's something I found.
16:53
When I write something and I've just finished it, I either think it's the worst thing ever or the greatest thing ever and never in between.
17:00
I'm either like I want to marry this or I never want to see this again.
17:04
Whereas then when I step away from it I have a bit more of a neutral objective view at what's good and bad. Mhm.
17:10
And I don't think I have that emotional attachment with other people's writing so I can often look at it and just go these are the three things that need to change.
17:20
But my question for you is do you think that that awareness, that understanding is a function of time or was it some insight that got unlocked in your mind that allowed you to see more clearly?
17:31
This is going to match your question engineering.
17:32
I mean in some sense, I mean right like writing like coding is symbol manipulation, right?
17:37
You're manipulating symbols that that have certain Now, there's I think with with writing English, you know, or natural language um it's not of course just like code in the sense of like it just performs it's not just sort of purely utilitarian.
17:51
There's there's connotation and poetic evocat- uh you know, what does it evoke?
17:56
The emotional kind of qualities of it.
17:58
There's a um there's there's a whole bunch of other aspects, but at some level it is symbol manipulation and like, you know, really just I think it's just for me at least wrote practice of you know, what something sounds off here.
18:13
Oh, it's, you know, passive too much passive voice.
18:16
The adjectives, too many adjectives doing too much work. I'm telling not showing.
18:21
I'm, you know, uh the transitions is off and I need to fix the way the clauses are structured, you know, it just becomes a lot of tactical things of like how at least for me that was a lot of the, you know, just and just sheer practice.
18:33
I spent 12 months, you know, significant portion of 12 months um on the actual act of writing this book um and just over and over and over and then like you know, how to structure sections like um you know, there's there's obviously there's classic techniques.
18:49
Um I do a lot in this book.
18:51
I do kind of the classic rhetoric style in each section where it's um you know, they'll sort of you'll have an intro that's kind of a more concrete maybe anecdote.
19:01
Um you'll move into it moves into the main argument.
19:05
Moves into the supporting arguments for the main the main proposition, the supporting arguments, uh sort of steel manning, giving the best version of counter arguments, answering those counter arguments, and then sort of tying it back to the original the kind of the beginning and to show sort of show give the reader a sense of through that process both right?
19:28
Like that that's a common I mean that would be sort of my default structure.
19:31
I I think if you do it too much it becomes formulaic, but I think if you read a lot of the sections of the book like particularly if readers want to the we'll jump more into the book, but like the last third of the book is all these is sort of these seven application areas sort of different use cases for blockchains.
19:47
Um and in those are each are each kind of stand alone sections and they all kind of follow roughly that kind of format.
19:53
Um and that format I think is nice because it gives it has sort of an emotional element, it has an intellectual element, it you're showing all the counter arguments, you're you know um if you if presenting them in the strongest way uh being kind of intellectually honest and kind of going through everything and then sort of giving the reader a sense of progress through that.
20:12
The biggest challenge with this book is a lot of the ideas are abstract.
20:18
It requires some kind of prerequisite knowledge.
20:23
Um but I wanted to make a book write a book that was enter you know entertaining to read and and backed up by by um you know data and stories and not just sort of abstractions, right?
20:39
Not like overly philosophical.
20:42
And so to the extent I could I tried to structure it somewhat chronologically and kind of go through the history of the internet.
20:47
Um I think each chapter I thought of as its own kind of challenge in that how could I make it a big part of the challenge was how can I make it simpler?
20:56
And when you talk about really getting it down to be simple, how did that happen?
21:00
Was it looking at drafts?
21:02
Was it rewriting paragraphs, sentences, sharing Oh many yeah yeah many um many yeah, I mean I thought thousands of iterations.
21:11
So, I'll tell the the the the rough history of the book is I wrote a first kind of draft of the first kind of two-thirds of it like probably in a month or two.
21:20
Like you know, and I just had I had something on paper.
21:25
Um, and then uh there were a bunch of problems with it, obviously.
21:28
One was um um it uh was was too abstract, too much passive voice, uh too much reliance on tell not show.
21:41
Like at crutch words, I'd call them adjectives, adverbs.
21:43
So, instead of you know, I would say things like the ownership is a big digital ownership is a big concept in the book and I would say things like genuine ownership.
21:50
And like the word genuine is doing a lot of work there.
21:53
Like what does that mean? Right?
21:55
And so, I basically or like blockchains can make strong commitment.
21:59
Strong is doing a lot of work work there.
22:01
Like what does that mean?
22:01
Um by the way, I had a lot of readers.
22:02
I had you know, I I work with a team of 80 people on my team and of that probably First of all, I have a guy Robert Hackett who's a former writer who's incredibly helpful to me.
22:13
I had um uh or he's he's a writer, but he's a former journalist.
22:17
Um uh I had uh 20 people on my team who did very thorough reads and like would give paragraph level comments.
22:26
Yeah, um like very paragraph like really like every almost every paragraph comments.
22:32
Hey, I don't buy this argument.
22:34
Hey, here's a counterargument.
22:35
Hey, this phrase didn't land for me.
22:39
Did you give them their own Google Docs or have them all do it in the same place?
22:42
Google Doc and I would I would basically like fork the copy the Google Doc and send it to them or something.
22:46
It was always this you know, it's always the thing with writing where you have like the master copy and then like this version and then and then you're like trying to merge the 14 comments together.
22:55
you change 17, but you're actually on 23.
22:57
You're like, oh my goodness.
22:59
I mean Google helps a lot.
22:59
I was using Word for a little while and I hadn't used Word in years, and I was like, they must be better now cuz I hadn't used it in 50 and it was not better.
23:05
It's like I I thought it was just got awful, but like like the fonts were all over the place, and I don't even know what's going on that thing, but and you can't share you know and then I was trying to use Word with Dropbox.
23:13
If you're having other people edit it and you're trying to do version control, I don't know.
23:18
Maybe there's maybe I was doing it wrong, but I just thought it was a nightmare.
23:21
The problem with Google specifically though is once you get I kept hitting this kind kind of comment limit where it would just start acting buggy.
23:26
I think it was cuz I had so many comments, and I would keep So I'd have to every 2 weeks copy and paste and create a new thing, which is really annoying.
23:36
Yeah, like it was basically like it was fine.
23:37
It was I mean it basically worked, and it was fine. Yeah, so I sent it out.
23:40
So I'd done the first draft.
23:42
Um one of the big problems with it like someone in a friendly way called it encyclopedic at times, which was their their friendly way of saying kind of boring and not Like basically there were sections where I was explaining stuff where I just kind of like list stuff, right?
23:59
Like there was no narrative form. There was no structure. There was no story.
24:04
Um and so it's been a lot of time.
24:05
I think I basically I I actually think I Like I'll give you an example like a chapter I really like is is called software It's a community created software.
24:13
It's really about this concept composability, and that was um that was a chapter It's a very abstract concept.
24:19
It's a very important concept.
24:21
Um and I feel like that was the one where like I really I spent a lot of time on that and finally really nailed that one.
24:27
I feel like it's a I feel generally like I did.
24:31
There's a few I don't know maybe I won't say which ones.
24:32
There's like two chapters that still I feel like I never kind of fully cracked um how to do in a way um in like the the full way I wanted to, and you know I I had a lot of discussions about this with with with people that were helping me, and in the end thought maybe okay, maybe there's just some parts where you just simply have to kind of convey information.
24:51
think a lot of the work of doing something like this is thinking through what sort of analogy or metaphor of Yeah, analogies.
24:59
You see like the city analogy comes back a lot. you have composability.
25:02
Okay, refers to a property of software that allows smaller pieces to be assembled into larger compositions.
25:07
I'm like, okay, cuz I'm basically your target reader.
25:12
I'm fairly interested in this.
25:12
I feel like this is the sort of book that could interest me, but I'm not like steeped in crypto lore, but that section is called software as LEGO bricks.
25:22
And now I'm like, ah, now I see that. Now I get it instantly.
25:25
And I feel like that was a lot of the work that you needed to do in this book. That was another part.
25:30
It was sectioning it like that.
25:31
Like that I think in the initial one it was chapters and it took me a long time to get it down to these two to three page sections to give them kind of nice simple titles.
25:38
By the way, one of my North Stars here is everything is for the reader.
25:42
So there was nothing like like whenever there was a choice, like do I put a chart? How do I title this? Like what is simpler? What is What is clear?
25:51
What is more for the reader?
25:53
You know, like very little jargon in the book, I I hope.
25:55
I don't think there's any jargon that's not I don't think there's any words that are not common words where I don't explain and define them.
26:02
And I And I don't think there's that many of them.
26:04
So for example, like in the blockchain people use the word decentralization a lot.
26:07
I almost never It probably occurs in the book, but it's certainly not commonly occurs.
26:10
Like everything is is tries to kind of How do we reduce it to simplicity? Simplicity.
26:18
Um so and and so going back to the process of the Um So okay, so I had 20 readers or something. Um Uh had a big rewrite.
26:28
I think it was one of the best rewrites was I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like removing every adjective and adverb.
26:35
And I'm exaggerating a little bit, but essentially it was like these things like strong ownership, genuineness, very I I don't think the word very is in the book. I hope it isn't.
26:44
Um maybe this is somewhere, but is, we'll burn it.
26:48
Yeah, but But like very like look, tech books like there's a thing where especially in tech books, where people try to hype things up. Right.
26:53
And they use all of these uh superlatives.
26:56
And so I And I feel like every time there's like a word very, what that really means is I haven't explained it well enough.
27:00
Cuz if I explain it well enough in a bunch of simple descriptive phrases, um the the reader will get it.
27:07
It's like it's very Wow, this is a better, you know, this this design is better than this design. Don't say that.
27:13
Show them and like show the consequences and tell the stories and show how it affects people.
27:18
I say the same thing with exclamation points.
27:20
If somebody writes with an exclamation point, they intuitively know that the language isn't strong enough and they're trying to compensate. that's right.
27:27
And I think I agree with you.
27:28
And I think that there's I would say that there are subtler The The only twist I would put on what you just said is that there are there are words that act in the same way as an exclamation point, right?
27:38
Like And like And you need to look for the the crutch words, as I'm calling them.
27:41
And so So that was a big change.
27:43
Like passive voice And passive voice is not just a simple matter of switching it, right? It takes work.
27:46
Cuz you're like, wait, who did that?
27:47
The internet was built to be a decentralized system.
27:50
That's not a good sentence.
27:50
What is a good sentence is, you know, Vint Cerf did this.
27:54
Tim Berners-Lee did the you know, like what actually happened, right?
27:58
So it's not just passive voice.
27:59
It's not like you can just, you know, plug it into ChatGPT and say give me active voice.
28:03
Like You It means you need to go do the work of like what happened, right?
28:06
Like tell a story, right?
28:08
Um so that was a huge rewrite.
28:11
That was like a multi-month process.
28:13
Then I had So I So sort of wrote the first draft, did the kind of like these kind of rewrites like this.
28:16
Had 20 really twice thank them in the acknowledgement.
28:20
There was about 20 people.
28:21
And some like some were general readers, some were technologists.
28:23
We had a few uh lawyers cuz some legal sections.
28:28
Um and they went through the paragraph level.
28:31
And then I did all And I went through all of those.
28:33
And you know, sometimes rejected the comments, but mostly took them into account.
28:38
Um I did another rewrite where I had I would call it kind of like um I would call it uh I was kind of defensive.
28:47
Like, I would bring up counter arguments to some of my arguments and then just sort of say they're wrong.
28:54
And then I did a rewrite, which I think is really improved it, which didn't it changed that.
28:58
So, like, there's a part that's in the takeaway section on on some of the objections.
29:02
Like, there's a Moxie Marlinspike, who's this respected security researcher, has this kind of very, I think, intelligent re- objections to some of my arguments.
29:11
Um, and the original version was sort of like, here's his argument, he's wrong.
29:14
And now it's actually here's his argument, that's a good argument.
29:16
Here are the design lessons one should take away from it, right?
29:20
And I did that a lot throughout the book.
29:21
I really sort of said like, what the network governance section, which is sort of how do you control and govern networks, originally I was sort of making these claims of like, now now with blockchains you can do much better governance.
29:31
And I finally realized like, you know, that's too strong a statement.
29:34
What blockchains really let you do is they let you have a much richer design space where you can design new governance systems, but we haven't figured out the best way to do it.
29:42
And so I rewrote that to be So, really, really try to make it like, you know, to really support the claims and like, show the weak points, show where things are not figured out, and like, make it more honest and authentic.
29:54
I don't know, not I I think that's a big problem with tech, particularly tech business books, is that they don't do that.
29:59
And so I really wanted this book to be different and to be, um, to be just like, honest, descriptive, simple declarative sentences, no hype, no I don't know, hopefully that came through. Yeah, it did.
30:11
Well, one of the things that you're so good at is one-liners.
30:14
And my favorite new Chris Dixon one-liner in this is that blockchains go from uh, don't be evil to can't be evil. That's so good.
30:22
So, tell me the story of that and do you like get excited when you find something like that?
30:26
Cuz that's the sort of stuff that really sticks in people's brains.
30:29
was a Google's famous, so when they started they were supposed to be a different company than all the other tech companies and that they were going to be don't be evil. That was their motto.
30:36
And I don't know, you can debate, I guess people could debate how Google is today.
30:41
I I certainly think they haven't lived up to that motto now and look at the search results and everything else and like just the way the company behaves.
30:46
I think I'm very disappointed and so um so you know, one of the promises of blockchains is that now you can you don't have to rely on corporate promises and legal you know, today how do you trust Google?
30:59
You're supposed to click through the 50-page privacy policy that pops up, you know, that have you ever read those or negotiated those?
31:05
Like that's our current trust system on the internet.
31:08
Like it's a it's a ridiculous system or they you know, the management promises don't be evil or something and one of the major benefits of a blockchain is you remove all that stuff and you simply encode, you know, in the in the blockchain code that's public and verifiable what the rules are.
31:22
What here's the rules of the social network.
31:24
Here's the rules of this game.
31:25
Here's the rules of this marketplace and it's built in there and if and if the blockchain if you build in those you can build block good and bad blockchains like any technology.
31:34
You can build evil blockchains or good but if you build a good one, you build it right and the right one will have encoded in it that that, you know, it's rules and ideally those rules are it's not that you have to trust it to not be evil.
31:46
It cannot be evil, right? Can't be evil.
31:48
So that's where the can't be evil comes from.
31:49
As you were thinking this title is really good. Oh, thanks.
31:50
And That was that was debated a lot by other people.
31:54
I I was always very adamant about that title but that was not always popular in the it's really good cuz I think that it has a few things going for it.
32:01
The first is it helps me remember the history that there was the read-only era of the internet.
32:07
Then we see the democratization of publishing.
32:08
That's where we're at now.
32:11
And then now we're moving into the ownership layer or the ownership time of the internet when we can actually have incentive structures and own a piece of these digital assets. And you wrote a piece.
32:23
I think it's the oldest piece on your site on naming things.
32:26
It was about naming startups and I went back and read it today.
32:30
Yeah, I mean like the the the there was debated like you know, some of the people helping me were like "Is that Is it too obscure?
32:39
People know what that means?
32:39
Um yeah, should it be called blockchains or web3 or something?"
32:43
Um I I felt like this was an important name because, as you said, it really is about kind of the the history and the evolution.
32:51
And so, for those who don't know, the the the way I describe in the book is there's sort of three eras of the internet, the read era, the write era, and the own era.
32:57
And I explain in detail like why those words, you know, are are used.
33:00
Um but I also like that um it's just they're simple words.
33:03
To me, that says I hope that signals accessibility. Yep.
33:08
Like I want this to be accessible.
33:10
Like that was my main thing with this book.
33:11
I wanted it to be anyone feels like they are welcome to read it.
33:13
Like and they will understand it and I'm not and I'm not trying to, you know, I'm trying to include them, not exclude them.
33:20
Um I also feel like when I got the physical book, I just got the first one like 2 weeks ago, I was I feel like I can't It's hard for me to look at this objectively, but I feel like when I glance through it, they're like short, relatively simple words, not a lot of jargon.
33:32
It feels like, you know, there's not a lot of I actually like Random House's style a lot if they they they're um house style, they removed a lot of punctuation, Hm.
33:42
which I liked actually in retro Like it just reads more like a novel or something.
33:45
They picked this font, which actually there's a cute little page at the end where it describes the font. 1722.
33:51
They they put this in there, but I liked it.
33:53
It was like It was like, "Look, that's a nice It looks like an old style font."
33:55
Like with the picture on the cover, this is this great artist that's that I hired. so indulgent.
33:59
This This book was set in in Caslon, a typeface first designed in 1722 by William Caslon. It's so indulgent.
34:08
The Roman is considered a workhorse typeface due to its pleasant, open appearance, while the italic is exceedingly decorative.
34:15
It's so funny also as a contrast. write that. No.
34:21
Random House put that in there and I I thought it was kind of endearing and so I didn't say anything.
34:24
I mean, I assume that's like something you do.
34:25
You have to credit the font or something, but it's great.
34:28
I think it's so funny, But, as a contrast to the rest of the book.
34:33
But, um I do most books don't have the font thing.
34:35
I don't know where that came I never asked Random House about that. Exceedingly decorative.
34:37
You could write for a thousand years and never put those two words together. like the font.
34:43
I think it looks you know, when I look at the book, maybe this is my philosophy background.
34:45
It feels like a kind of a philosophy book, like an older school book.
34:49
And like I wanted the cover to be kind of like the this is really great artist who did the cover he did a bunch of covers and chose that one.
34:56
But, um just so you know, so it feel like a accessible kind of book and not like kind of heavy jargon book.
35:02
And so but uh my agent called the book he called Rewrite Rome Nomic, which is like you know, kind of mysterious, mister you know, like kind of like you hear what Rewrite Rome what is that, you know, kind of cryptic I guess. I don't know, we'll see.
35:16
How is we've spoken about your short blog post four paragraphs, spoken about a book.
35:19
How is writing something like this different from what I think is a masterful piece, how Aristotle created the computer which you put in the Atlantic 2018 or so? Yeah.
35:30
How is that piece different from writing a book?
35:32
Well, the big thing with the book I mean like it's the obvious part with the book is I mean obviously it's longer and it takes more time.
35:38
But, that actually has it's not just the length, right?
35:41
Cuz what happens with the length is that you have so a couple things.
35:43
Like I found that I could only reread the book every two weeks or so.
35:48
Um in the sense of so like one of the hard things with the book that's not hard in the blog post, right?
35:51
Is like repetition and omission.
35:53
Like did I say that already? Right?
35:56
And like has that concept been explained?
35:58
Like now on page 60 I'm picking up an idea on page 30.
36:00
Like is that too far away?
36:04
Um you know, did I explain it fully?
36:04
Did I am I repeating it I had a lot in a lot of drafts I had a lot to way too much repetition.
36:10
Like let me re-explain composability.
36:12
And like you know, and and so but is it too much repetition or is it too far away?
36:17
Can you refer back to it?
36:19
Like you kind of have to have a fresh read to do that, right?
36:20
That's what I mean by every two weeks.
36:21
I have if I read it to I could read it again like whatever it takes six hours to read a book or something I don't know what it takes, but like but I couldn't read it fresh. Right?
36:30
I couldn't read it with fresh eyes and so I wouldn't be able to spot the repetition and things.
36:34
So I found that like for example, I had to wait 2 weeks and so I had this whole process where like in those 2 weeks, I would sort of hack away on like one section and sort of try to figure out a section.
36:45
Um and then, you know, if I figure out I mean how to structure it, how to make it compelling, how to um simplify the ideas.
36:51
I spent a lot of time I sort of think of the right for me writing this book is two it was sitting in front of the computer and then there was like I would do it often when I exercise of like how can I chop down the concepts to make it simpler, simpler, simpler, simpler.
37:01
My my own personal process is I will wake up early in the morning.
37:06
Um I always usually work better in the morning.
37:08
I get like three or four good hours in me and then I'm probably not creative anymore.
37:14
Um and will write and, you know, in front of a computer and actually do the writing.
37:18
And then um I often will find that there's sort of a naughty conceptual problem, like a knot k n o not a knot. Sorry.
37:28
I'm being so naughty today.
37:28
You're so naughty with your words.
37:31
Um there's like a naughty conceptual problem and um and then that's for me like I I had a lot of these.
37:37
Like what was the um there were particular sections at the end.
37:40
There's one on finance and there's one on social networking and like those were just killed me.
37:44
Like I went I probably did 50 iterations of those and just kept thinking over and over of like what's the right way to frame this?
37:50
What's the right, you know, um and um and and so yeah, would go and and, you know, and like whenever things feel jumbled, I always feel like I'm just missing the right distinction, the right concept.
38:01
And like once I figure out the right concept, oh, that will right?
38:03
That it will all just sort of fall into place.
38:07
Like I sort of feel like everything should be simple and if it's not simple, then I haven't thought about it enough, right?
38:13
Yeah, well, I found a few things.
38:13
So something I see all the time is that I'll be writing, but I'm just my fingertips are moving, but I'm don't have that same intentionality.
38:23
And when there's that muck that's coming out of me, I often don't know the core thing that I'm trying to say.
38:31
So, when you say come for the tool, stay for the network, there's a lot of things that you've just been given. Yep.
38:39
You've been given a structure.
38:39
The first the beginning will be come for the tool, the second will be stay for the network.
38:45
You'll probably have a few examples there that show what's going on.
38:47
And then when you edit, if something doesn't go back to that one sentence, you're like, "I'm going to cut this." Yeah. That's right. That's right.
38:56
over and over again what will happen is I'll be super stuck, and I'll go and I'll talk to a friend, and I'll explain it to them, and then they'll say, "Come for the tool, stay for network.
39:05
That's what you're trying to say."
39:06
And often I get it Socratically what that one-liner is, what that answer is.
39:11
Yeah, I mean, speaking to people is a matter, you know, going out often for me the logjam will break of just like going out, having conversations, like getting out of your element, you know, time fixes it.
39:22
But I But I always feel like, yeah, if it's not super simple, like I haven't I haven't thought about it enough, right?
39:27
It has to be so broken down.
39:30
Um but going back to the If you want want to finish on the process, the um so I went through, had 20 people, you know, did the did the remove the crutch words, remove the adjectives, um steel man the counterarguments, you know, all of that.
39:43
Had 20 people um critique it. Went through all of it.
39:48
I took 2 weeks off of work.
39:50
We have this break in the summer, and I just took it off and rented a house on the beach, and just like literally all alone for 2 weeks worked on that, going through all the comments.
40:00
And then Okay, and then I thought, okay, this is getting good.
40:02
And then I went and did a fresh read, and I was horrified, because I was like, basically I had um gone through and done all these comments, but now the structure was all ruined. Right?
40:11
ruined. Right? Cuz it was just like I had just sort of like layered over all of these different things, and it was just a mess, and I was like how could I and I was actually kind of scary in a way I don't know scary but like it was just a little bit disturbing cuz I was just so far I thought I was
40:27
getting close to being done and I was like wow this is really just not structured right so then I had to do I hate that moment I mean the word that the word that came to mind was despair I've had moments when I thought I was really close and somebody says hey man it's just not
40:40
good enough and there's something about restructuring what I find so interesting about structure is have you heard the line about painters that the turpentine yeah exactly people who are outside of painting they talk about you know form and function and people who are inside
40:54
of the world of painting they talk about where to find cheap turpentine I think it's such a good line and I think it's the same thing with writing that writers always talk about structure because as writers we know that once you find the structure the content it actually just falls follows from that and a really
41:11
good structure is invisible a really good structure seems obvious but I know that that is the work and to go back to this moment the reason I feel a sense of despair is because I know how much work has just comes back to just taking this putting it here taking that putting it there and then I can only even imagine
41:32
in the in a project the size of a book trying to basically know what state the reader has in their mind that's the hardest part that's the hardest part the hardest part for me I mean there's a million hard parts of a book but um but yes like they're now on page 190 this is the average reader like what are
41:49
they thinking what's clear to them what isn't and so what I the other thing I found like is that having the 20 readers um was of course invaluable because they just know stuff I don't know and you know would just say smart things but also the way I've come to think of it this is
42:04
we're talking before the video about George Saunders of this book um a swim in the pond in the rain that was a great book I read that after I wrote after I wrote the book I've read I've I've on a reading binge more than I've ever been after since I finished the book about 4 months ago. I think partly because I
42:15
I think partly because I appreciate books more.
42:16
I mean, I've always liked books, but and I also read a bunch of books about writing.
42:20
Um But uh I he has some line in there about how I I'm going to butcher it, but it essentially like you you kind of think of it as like I you're reading my you're reading the book, and then in your mind, it's really an interactive process, right?
42:35
You're you're as the reader is now processing what you wrote, but then also thinking of counterarguments.
42:40
And if I don't if I, the writer, don't you know, if you read five paragraphs and you thought of five counterarguments and I don't address them, at some point you're going to stop reading the book.
42:50
You're going to be like, this person's just off on a different branch of the world, right?
42:54
Um and so how do you know kind of what branch they're going down and what they're thinking, right?
43:01
I I think that you can try to guess and anticipate it, but I don't think there's any substitute for having readers who who are good readers who give you that feedback.
43:07
And they'd be like, well, this is not what I like I don't get this. I'm thinking this.
43:11
Here's my counterargument.
43:12
Like So that was the other thing of having and maybe 20s I don't know if 20s is the right number.
43:15
I mean, at some point it becomes impossible unwieldy and how many people can you really ask to do, you know, like to do close reads? amongst editors. It's Right.
43:23
It's probably a power law.
43:24
I mean, there's different levels to this.
43:26
There's the copy edits and then there's, "Hey, I think that you can rejigger this."
43:29
But every now and then I'll get a comment where somebody can see the most fundamental layer of what it is that I'm saying.
43:37
They can see that I'm saying something that I haven't even explicitly said.
43:41
And they can say, "If you can take this and change it to that, everything else falls into place." That's great. Yeah.
43:48
And those editors are kind of unlock, yeah. hard to find. Yeah. That's interesting.
43:54
So So that was anyway, so that So then and then so then I had to refactor it and that was the next kind of 4 months and then there was just all the details.
44:01
I can't believe how many details how much time I had to put in.
44:02
I mean, there's just like, you know, acknowledgements and this and that and put over the index and the you know, we have an it's nice index.
44:09
The Random House did a lot of that.
44:11
The um endnotes, checking the endnotes.
44:13
I hired a outside separate fact-checker. Oh, tell me about that.
44:18
So, this great woman Laura Fox who um has sort of experience at a bunch of magazines and things and um like I this is a controversial topic.
44:25
I know that it's going to get fact-checked by the world and so I said, "Look, let me just go do you know, go crazy, no limits, just like find any mistakes in the book."
44:35
And as a byproduct she did and she found you know, that I like I look I lived through a lot of this so like it was directionally correct, but of course I you know, I had to do some dates wrong.
44:42
I had some attributions wrong and she fixed all that and corrected me.
44:45
Um but also she found some great um as a byproduct found some great quotes.
44:49
Um like there's a like so in the so it's called read write on and in the 2000s there was this thing you know, people called the web 2 movement of sort of the social media movement, but actually at the time it was actually called the read write movement.
45:02
It was a very common thing.
45:04
It yeah, I mean this is not read write is not my phrase.
45:07
Um and and but I wasn't and I sort of wanted to say that and sort of say, "Hey, like this read write on I'm adding the on to it, but I'm not making up the read write."
45:15
Like this that that history of like the read you know, or the read write era that is a common take on it.
45:21
I like more I found this great quote from this very popular blog called the read write web that was like the manifesto of that web that I put in the book which sort of you know, as an example.
45:29
So, so that I hired an outside fact-checker um uh and researcher um you know, how I had some help with like the charts and stuff.
45:37
That all took forever, you know, that's all been very carefully vetted.
45:40
Um there was some data and other things in there.
45:43
Um so anyways, just graphic design the book is a quite a process if for those of you who are watching if they're thinking about going through it, but I want to go back to a moment early in your life when I think that you realized the benefits of writing.
45:56
You wrote a letter to Alan Kay.
45:58
Uh did I have that on my blog?
45:58
I don't know where I found that.
46:02
I think I maybe I blogged about that once. That's funny.
46:03
Or maybe I was on a plane. really influence you. I forget how I found it.
46:07
When I was a kid, I used to write letters and um I don't know why.
46:11
Um but uh I used to like write physical letters.
46:14
This is, you know, the '80s, so it's before like the internet or whatever and or the internet existed but not in its modern form.
46:20
Um and yeah, and I was living in Ohio in a small town in Springfield, Ohio, like relatively small town.
46:25
Um and was really into computers and I got uh and I guess it was an Apple at the time, I think. It was Atari or Apple.
46:32
Um and had no and there was again, it was sort of early, you know, very pre pre-browser and everything.
46:40
Um and so I had no computer manual, so I wrote a letter to I think it was to Apple.
46:46
Um and I said I'm I said I am this whatever, I guess I was, you know, 11-year-old kid or something in Ohio and I'm really into programming and I don't have I see at the time This is I don't know if anyone's going to be interested in this, but at the time there was like this computer's like
47:01
this mystical thing cuz you couldn't go Google it, you couldn't do whatever and like it literally like there was a like the Apple II had like 64K of memory and each memory location would do have different things it would do and almost nobody would know what they do unless you had like the original manual. So yeah, I wrote a letter and I got a
47:17
So yeah, I wrote a letter and I got a letter back from I wish I saved it from Alan Kay who's a famous researcher and they sent me this giant box of books.
47:22
It was a it was I don't Where did you see that? That's funny.
47:25
I must have put that in a blog post somewhere. But um I don't know.
47:28
It's actually remarkable.
47:30
I think people could still do it today.
47:31
Like I think if you just write nice letters to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, I bet you you will get a 99% success rate.
47:38
Um in fact, I know you will because they all I will tell you now I'll skip ahead to the secret, which is they all have offices of the CEO who basically will if a kid writes a letter, they will say do it and it works partly that they all will respond because they it actually doesn't happen that often.
47:56
They get like these angry like crazy letters and they don't they don't you know they just send those off to legal or something.
48:01
But like if you write a friendly respectful letter particularly if you're a kid cute kid who might end up in the press like they will they will give you a tour of a 737. Yeah.
48:09
All right Chris, what I want to do is I want to switch the the focus of this conversation into business models for writers.
48:17
But I want to start off with why you chose to write a book.
48:23
You have a tweet from 2014 where you say most business books exist because the book format still has cultural gravitas.
48:30
Bloggers don't appear on Charlie Rose or get reviewed by the New York Times.
48:37
I know that I think that's true and that's part of why I wrote a book.
48:38
And I also say by the way as a funny aside um I think people because I run a fund and I'm a business person, people expect this to be kind of a book that's like well one is a lot of people have said did you write the book?
48:53
Um like and in fact I've gotten them from entrepreneurs.
48:55
They just assume you don't you don't write the book because most people that do what I do don't write books.
49:01
Um number one and then number two if you do write a book it's like seven ways to be successful or something.
49:05
It's sort of a you know how-to sort of type of thing and it's definitely not that type of book.
49:12
Um and so um so anyway so that's just a kind of a funny aside.
49:15
But um um and I and I and I do think most business books are not good for that reason.
49:22
Look at the problem with business books generally is they aren't all and they are written by the person or if they are written by the person most business people are under high a lot of constraints um about what they can say.
49:31
So like I've read a lot of business books and like I won't name names but like there was one that business book that when I was talking to publishers and agents were like oh you should read this business book.
49:42
And so you know we think this is a good one.
49:44
And I read it and I was like you know I can see why they think it's good.
49:46
It's sold a lot of copies but it's fake.
49:47
And I know it's fake because it was a book about a bunch of projects that the person worked on and I've been involved with a bunch of projects in my life and I will tell you something about projects.
49:58
When you have a project that's involved let's say 100 people that's creating something, they're creating like a startup or, you know, creative project, uh they are [ __ ] shows.
50:08
Every project that involves a lot of people over a long period of time is a giant series of [ __ ] shows, cluster [ __ ] like whatever that maybe work out in the end, okay? I can confirm.
50:17
if you read a book that is about somebody's creative processes and it doesn't involve that, it's not authentic, okay?
50:22
And so like one book that would be fun to write would be a book about like startups and what actually happened.
50:28
The problem with that book is I can't write that book, right?
50:31
And and no business person probably can unless they're like quitting the industry forever because it's going to be a bunch of like there's just a bunch of stuff that's not my place to say of like stuff that went wrong, right?
50:42
Um and it really isn't my place.
50:44
Maybe you could write like a you know, like a yeah, I don't know.
50:47
Like you just it's So so you don't want to write Tristan said about this.
50:50
I asked him, "What is it What is a book that you would want to write?"
50:54
And he said and he goes, "I'd write a roman à clef."
50:55
And I'm like, "I don't know what a roman à clef is." in disguise, yeah.
51:00
goes, "Yeah, so it's a book in disguise where everything that happened actually happened, but all of the names, dates, and events have been changed." Yeah.
51:08
Yeah, that's I think that's that would be the that would probably be the honest business book, right?
51:11
Um or you kind of go like I did and sort of go up a level of abstraction and don't you know, I don't go into all the messy details, but there's a lot of stuff I learned from those messy details, right?
51:23
Um And so so I think you look I just do think a lot of business books for that.
51:27
Either they can't tell the truth cuz they're under constraints or they don't really write the book.
51:30
And so that was what I think part of my tweet was referring to was like, "Why just skip all of that stuff and write a Generally my view has been write a blog post."
51:38
Now, the advantage of a book and why I wrote a book is a couple of fold.
51:42
One, I really felt strongly in this case that this that what I say in this book simply could not be compressed any further.
51:47
Like I believe this is a highly compressed.
51:49
It's 213 pages main text.
51:51
I think that's right, roughly.
51:54
Um, that that goes through the history of the internet, explains blockchains, explains, you know, gives a bunch of future applications, covers a lot of ground.
52:03
I hope it does it in a way that's understandable.
52:06
But, you know, it's compressed.
52:06
Like it can't be made into a series of blog posts. Number one.
52:09
Number two, yes, to the point of that tweet, I do agree with that.
52:13
Books have this ability, I think, to cross over into a different kind of realm of I mean a book is in some way like there's different ways to look at a book, right?
52:23
It's a it's obviously a you know, um the there's a the physical book and the things written in it, but it's also kind of a um container for me a meme container. Yeah.
52:35
I was going to say a normie IPO.
52:35
It's a meme it's a meme delivery vehicle, right?
52:40
It's like a CD delivers a movie it delivers a meme.
52:42
And you just see like books like Actually, I was really shocked and kind of depressed to look at the book sales figures when I started this project.
52:48
The books just don't sell.
52:51
I mean, I'm look I'm used to the internet.
52:51
Like we have small web you know, some hobbyist website will get a million views and like I think the best selling kind of non-romance non-fiction book last year was like 400,000 copies or five you know, like Should have written a romance novel.
53:05
Yeah, romance apparently romance-y is what I'm told is the thing.
53:07
It's fantasy meets romance is like the hot thing.
53:09
So, if this read write own doesn't work out, that's but um but um but you know, so like I mean but but that said, like if you think about it, how many books have there been that have had profound, you know, like the ideas have spread very far. Um, number one.
53:26
I think the other really cool thing about books is there Did you see um the new Spider-Verse movie? The Spider-Verse 2? No.
53:34
I've checked out of the Marvel stuff. No, no, it's not Marvel.
53:35
No, it's the cartoon this is cartoon ones. It's totally different.
53:38
I agree I don't watch Marvel.
53:39
But the Spider-Verse is like this very creative cartoon thing.
53:43
Anyways, but they have um they have this idea of they call it So, it's like this multiverse and the world splits, but there's this thing called canon events.
53:50
And a canon event is an event that's so important in your life that in any version of the multiverse, um it it it it is it persists.
53:57
So, like in Spider-Man's case, getting bit by the spider, that has to be sort of essential to his character and everything.
54:02
Anyway, so canon And then but the reason I mentioned it is now become a thing on Tik Tok.
54:06
People talk about their canon events, okay?
54:08
It's like an internet meme now. Okay.
54:09
So, anyways, the other thing I think is interesting about books is that they can create canon events, right?
54:14
So, maybe only this will I don't know how many people will read this book.
54:17
Maybe it's, you know, not as many as read my blog post or something cuz it's just the nature of books.
54:22
But I think that what I hope is 10 years from now there'll be somebody comes up to me and like, you know, they created some great product or idea or something, invention, and they say, you know, that book was a canon event.
54:36
Like books can be canon They can have that kind of impact on a relatively small group of people.
54:39
So, I think there's two I think one is they can propagate memes in a way that that um and just sort of affect the cultural zeitgeist, the you know, just just just introduce ideas to the sort of broader world in a way that blog posts and podcasts it's harder for them much harder for them to.
54:57
And then two, I think on specific people, like I think about my own life.
55:00
Like my career my life was changed by various books.
55:02
Like I The reason I got into philosophy was a bunch of sort of gateway books that were kind of computer science meets philosophy and like um I think that's true with a lot of people that like So, so that that to me is the power of a book and I want it to do that.
55:13
Um but ultimately for me it was this idea that uh you know, I I felt Well, I let me say one other thing, which is I I've worked in technology for 25 years, and generally I've found there's some gap between the what I see as quote the I view as the reality of the technology and the public perception of it.
55:36
Um however, the gap is not that wide.
55:36
In this case, I think the gap is just absolutely massive.
55:40
So, there's this, you know, crypto is like scams and casinos and FTX and I view and and that exists and I think that's a perversion kind of co-option of the real technology.
55:50
I view blockchains as the most important invention for potentially returning the internet to its original ideals.
55:57
Okay, so I view it just just the gap between the two is so wide that and that and that kind of like look, when all a lot of bad stuff happened like the FTX crash and just a bunch of like scams and other things like 2 years ago, like that was upsetting.
56:12
And at first, I was like, this is depressing like this gap between like what I see as like this very important new way to build networks and it have all of these positive benefits that's um and and the perception of it is scams and, you know, all of this other speculation.
56:27
Um and at first, I kind of felt sorry for myself or whatever depressed about it.
56:32
And then I said, you know what, this is actually the greatest opportunity in my career to write a book.
56:38
Like, what if you could close that gap?
56:39
And actually, after writing this book, I was like, that was kind of fun.
56:40
Maybe I should write another book.
56:41
And then every idea I think of, like, they're okay, but I'm like, wow, I that was a really like on there's nothing I see that has that kind of gap.
56:49
Like, there is such a gap.
56:51
I basically guarantee you that anyone who reads this will find will have a new It is a different view of the internet than they are told.
56:57
It's a different history of the internet.
56:59
I think it's a completely coherent and fully argued view of it.
57:02
I'm not expecting everyone to like read it and immediately be converted, but I do think they will come away from it saying, "Okay, that is a well I think an honest read is that is a well-thought-out different view of the world."
57:15
I think that this is a good teaching moment because I spend so much time talking to people who come to me and say, "What should I write about?
57:24
What should I write about?"
57:25
And Bezos has a line where he says, "Your profit margin is my opportunity.
57:30
Your margin is my opportunity."
57:31
And what I would say back to people is their ignorance is your opportunity.
57:37
the most misunderstood thing?
57:38
What is the most misunderstood thing?
57:39
What is something that you look at the world and you say, "People think this, that is wrong.
57:43
I know why and I'm going to argue for something else."
57:47
I think it's great advice and that's how I felt.
57:48
Like I felt with this book I mean, I can't tell you how clear I mean, obviously I wrote the book, but even before I wrote the book, like I spent my whole life career doing this.
57:56
So, I mean, obviously, but like I I am like looking at this, you know, thing in front of me and I see it so clearly and it's just like everything I see in the world is through this lens and the internet.
58:06
I mean, people spend 7 hours on the internet.
58:08
I spend at least that many hours.
58:09
Like it's a lot big part of my life and I view it through a certain lens.
58:14
And very few other people view it through that lens and I feel like it's a fully worked out full worldview, fully defensible, you know, kind of lens of the on the world.
58:22
Um and it's just like it kind of drives you crazy in a way cuz it's like what does why doesn't why doesn't everyone else see it that way?
58:30
Um and so to your I agree with you.
58:30
To your point, like I mean, now there's an interesting follow-up, right, which is are you And actually I I actually to be totally candid, like until I wrote the book part of my reason I wrote the book was to test myself.
58:43
I'm like, I feel like this is just like the world's wrong and I'm right.
58:47
Like is everyone crazy or am I crazy?
58:47
Um but the way to really prove it is to write it out in a way that like By the way, Bezos talks about this, too, and I think he's right.
58:55
Like why is there no PowerPoints at Amazon?
58:56
Cuz PowerPoints let you kind of a lead or skip over sloppy sloppy thinking.
59:02
Writing, one of the many virtues of writing, right, is it forces you to see all the steps, to show your work.
59:09
And so for me, partly also the book was a personal test of like, am I crazy?
59:13
Like my my view of the world is so different than most people's.
59:14
Am I crazy or they crazy?
59:16
All right, and I'm like I will tell you now I don't believe I'm crazy.
59:19
So, like I've now written it out in a very, um you know, like detailed, step-by-step kind of argument kind of way um and uh and and so yeah so part of it was the a test of that but but I think that advice you give is great.
59:33
I think I think kind of what is your you know it's Peter Thiel has this concept of what is your secret and you know you're familiar with this so like the basic idea is um you know if you I have a startup idea my startup idea is I'm going to create an iPhone with longer battery life.
59:47
Okay, that's not a good startup idea. Why?
59:50
Because it's not a secret because Apple is everyone knows that's a useful product.
59:53
Apple is probably got a lab of 10,000 people or I don't know or 1,000 people working with batteries and making well iPhones longer lives, right?
59:59
Most startups involve something kind of counterintuitive.
1:00:03
There's something that's what he means by a secret, right?
1:00:07
Um that you know it turns out people do want to all get on the internet and socialize and do this and this is sort of Mark Zuckerberg's secret, right?
1:00:13
At the time it didn't seem like an obvious behavior.
1:00:16
Um that you know my Bill Gates that at the time hardware was the the business model of um of computer companies that's everyone knew that the way you make money is you sell machines.
1:00:26
He said, "No, I'm going to make money selling software."
1:00:29
That was contrarian, right?
1:00:32
Um and so you know so and and Peter Thiel would also say I think I think he talked about an earned secret.
1:00:35
So like you have like you don't just come to the secret um you know just like walking on the street and discover that like people want software, right?
1:00:44
Like came through like he was programming, he was building stuff, he was seeing it and he was sort of understanding how he sort of you know had it takes it takes time.
1:00:51
And to your point I I think that that that I'm not sure that's the only reason to write a book but I think certainly one good way to think about what to write about is like sort of what is your earned secret. Right?
1:01:06
What do you know about the world?
1:01:07
I think this I think I'm just rephrasing what you said by the way.
1:01:08
I think is it that that's counterintuitive that's different that for some reason because of my life experience you know I know and it's not obvious to everybody else. Of course.
1:01:19
You were talking earlier about almost lamenting the way that the internet has not turned out to be this utopian ideal in the way that we thought.
1:01:32
And for me, the one that just breaks my heart is that there aren't as many profitable niches as I think there could be, especially in the intellectual sphere. Yeah.
1:01:42
The platonic ideal of the internet that I want to spend my at least the next decade fostering is fixing this problem where we have all these domain experts who haven't shared their ideas, written them, and published them for other people to know and understand. Mhm.
1:02:03
And then it doesn't just help the general public, the readers, it also helps the domain experts.
1:02:08
And what I want to be helping people do is I call this your core idea.
1:02:14
Take those domain experts who've been working in a field for 20 years.
1:02:16
What is that idea that you know is true?
1:02:18
What is that story that you need to tell?
1:02:21
That message that you need to spread?
1:02:22
Now, let me help you find polish, distribute that core idea.
1:02:27
Because when we talk about what the internet could be, what the internet should be, what the internet will be if we get this right will be this explosion of information because people are sharing their domain expertise.
1:02:40
Why aren't they doing it today in your view? I have a few reasons.
1:02:44
First of all, I think writing is a very good way to do it, and writing is hard.
1:02:47
You were talking earlier about these people run businesses, they have a bunch of demand on their time.
1:02:52
I think that's the first thing.
1:02:53
The second is what I call a cold start distribution problem, which I'm getting excited about solving, which is say that I take a VP at a relatively successful corporation, and they've been working at this company for 25 years.
1:03:09
They're an They're an expert in, let's call it, Telco.
1:03:15
How does Jane How does she write a great piece and she needs support with that and we can give her that at Write of Passage.
1:03:22
But then the second thing is how does she get that idea out there?
1:03:26
She doesn't have an audience, she doesn't have reach, but what I want to figure out how to do is how can I take anybody and get them to write one article that changes their life.
1:03:37
And I think that the distribution problem is challenging and a lot of the narrative from the last decade or so, which I actually think was right, is you need to write consistently and I'm beginning to think how do I do it with one piece? Yeah.
1:03:51
Yeah, that there is this rich get richer problem, right?
1:03:53
And the consistency is critical to building up the audience cuz if you just pop out one great article, where are you going to place it?
1:03:58
Maybe you get it in a existing publication, but otherwise, if you have no social media following, how do you get it out there?
1:04:06
How do people know about it? It's very hard. to so many smart people. I can't believe it.
1:04:11
People who, listeners, you would know their names and we respect the heck out of them and I talk to them and they're like, "Oh, I'm not a good writer. I can't write."
1:04:18
And I'm like, "Explain to me why you can't write."
1:04:20
And they'll mention A or B.
1:04:23
I'm like, "Look, I've heard that a hundred times."
1:04:28
And so not just giving them answers, but then trying to give them a proper tactical solution because writing is the scary thing.
1:04:33
I think it begins when we're in elementary school, it extends in the middle school. It's the scary thing.
1:04:39
People are afraid to look bad in public and I think that that's why we have this this inefficiency in the world right now.
1:04:47
It's hard to just I think, you know, I mean, it takes a lot of time.
1:04:52
It's the folks you're discussing are busy people with families and careers and like to sit down and structure your day around it, right?
1:04:59
I mean, it really requires new habits in many ways.
1:05:02
I had to kind of change to write the book.
1:05:04
I had to change a lot of my lifestyle.
1:05:05
Yeah, but you thank your wife at the end and you say, "Thank you."
1:05:09
my wife is a lot, you know, just um, incredibly supportive, um, you know, just exercise, getting to bed early, getting up at whatever, just colleagues picking up slack.
1:05:19
Like, it's just it's hard to do.
1:05:21
It's very hard to do, and not everyone can has the ability to to do those things and has that situation. So, Yeah.
1:05:25
Well, this is the problem that I'm devoting my career to solving. it's a worthy problem. Thank you.
1:05:33
Talk to me about a thousand true fans.
1:05:36
And you have a bit of a critique in the book basically saying it hasn't quite panned out like we thought.
1:05:40
This is a famous blog post by Kevin Kelly, who's a, you know, brilliant author, co-founder of Wired magazine, kind of a tech optimist.
1:05:50
Um, actually he's one of the blurbs on my back of the book on the on the final book, which I was very excited about because he I sent him the book, and he's actually pro-tech, but he's actually been a long-time blockchain skeptic, and the quote on the back of the book that he he gave me, and I sent him the book, and I don't like I don't know.
1:06:07
I mean, he's I know him, but he's not going to say nice things if he doesn't believe them.
1:06:13
Um, and he said it changed his mind.
1:06:14
He said and that was yeah, and so that was actually I put that on the back of the book.
1:06:18
But, um, um, about blockchains and made him positive on it, so that was great.
1:06:22
But, anyways, um, so he he's got a lot of great blog posts.
1:06:25
I'd highly encourage I think it's kk. org.
1:06:27
He's like an old-school blog He's still blogging and he has a new book out, too, by the way, um, on like life advice.
1:06:32
I just got um, We interviewed him, yeah. Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah. Okay. I love Kevin Kelly. Um, Yeah, me, too.
1:06:36
And so, um, uh, so he has this great blog post a thousand true fans.
1:06:40
And the idea was this is still in the kind of optimistic era.
1:06:42
I think he wrote it in the early 2000s, but it was before the kind of what I think of as the reversal where the internet got taken over by these companies, and it was still kind of this open internet utopian dream.
1:06:53
And the idea was the internet would change, um, how creators can make a living.
1:06:58
And specifically that instead of needing kind of mass market distribution, so you think about pre-internet music, you had to get, you know, you either got a record deal and on the radio and you were sort of a pop star or you were broke, right? Or something.
1:07:11
I mean, it's sort of maybe not maybe there's someone who's in the middle, but for the most part that was kind of the game, right?
1:07:15
You had to get this mass audience.
1:07:18
And so a lot of the early promise of the internet was that you this would change it and you could have all of these sort of millions and millions of niches.
1:07:22
The key idea is when you remove all of these layers of intermediaries, you just dramatically change the economics of creators.
1:07:31
Like I think I get I'm actually putting all the money from the book back into the book marketing. But I believe I get 15%.
1:07:37
I think that's what book authors get.
1:07:40
I'm pretty sure it's 15%.
1:07:41
I mean, that's I mean like it's nice, but 85% goes somewhere else, like right?
1:07:45
I mean, like there's a lot of interme- There's I mean, look, and I'm not begrudging that.
1:07:48
Like the retailer should get paid and the publisher should get paid.
1:07:50
But like that's the way that most creative economics work.
1:07:54
Um And so that was the promise that was the sort of original promise of the internet.
1:08:00
Um was that you could go direct and then that would just dramatically transform the economics and you wouldn't need to go mass market.
1:08:06
And what that meant and that that So I think that is very important not just because creators should make money and that would let them make money, right?
1:08:12
But also that means you could get kind of the world you're describing, right?
1:08:15
Like here's my argument to you is is the world you're describing where, you know, I'm an expert on air-airplane propellers.
1:08:23
Like why isn't that person sharing the information?
1:08:26
Um part of it is this mass the logic of mass of of mass audiences, right?
1:08:28
Like today because like how many people are actually interested in this, you know, whatever, you know, pick your niche, you know, how many people And And the answer is often not that many people.
1:08:39
Maybe it is only thousands, right?
1:08:40
Um and so, you know, a lot of this comes down to the internet structure.
1:08:45
Like what if we had an internet where we didn't have these intermediaries?
1:08:48
So I mean, so to Kevin Kelly going back, Kevin Kelly wrote this post.
1:08:51
This is where people like me and everyone thought this was headed.
1:08:53
We're going to have this internet without intermediaries.
1:08:56
Everyone's going to have a direct relationship with their audience and that will in turn have the secondary benefit of everyone if you can have this millions of niches and people can make a living serving a niche instead of serving a mass audience, right?
1:09:09
And that would have this additional kind of nice human flourishing aspect that everyone could just do Yeah, you could if you if you're interested in some weird niche, you can just go do it.
1:09:17
And you don't have to sacrifice your creative ideals to sort of sell out, right?
1:09:24
You don't have to You can stay an indie band.
1:09:26
You don't have to go try to be a, you know, you can stay the cool indie band in Brooklyn and you don't have to go try to be, you know, playing stadiums in Milwaukee, right?
1:09:34
Like and that just seemed not only like a better economic future, but a better cultural future.
1:09:39
And that was what was so exciting about that idea.
1:09:41
And I think that idea got hijacked by these big tech companies who basically the Facebooks and the Twitters reinserted themselves as intermediaries.
1:09:49
We actually have a now situation that I would argue is even worse than the pre-internet era because in the pre-internet era, like I just have the book, I get 15%.
1:09:55
On Facebook, you get 0%, right?
1:09:57
They they make $150 billion a year running ads and they share none of that with the creators.
1:10:02
Like it's really almost unprecedented business history that you have intermediaries that don't share any of the revenue. Some It varies. Like YouTube shares 45%.
1:10:11
Um, you know, Spotify takes 30%, the labels take another huge chunk, you know, so like each one varies, but like the main social networks take 100%.
1:10:17
I go with this is all you know, I walk through this all in detail in the book, but um So, you know, that that I think as a result has created a whole bunch of negative effects.
1:10:28
And one is economic, but there are also kind of cultural ones. What is it now?
1:10:31
Now what do you try to do on these networks?
1:10:33
Well, you try to go get a mass audience.
1:10:34
You try to appeal to lowest common denominator.
1:10:38
You talk I've heard you talk about recency bias.
1:10:39
The algorithms favor freshness and newness and liveliness and sensationalism. angry. And yeah.
1:10:47
thing out of all the things in the world, that is the thing I'm the most angry about.
1:10:49
algorithms are just like whatever the algorithm favors.
1:10:51
And by the way, these algorithms are opaque.
1:10:53
They don't disclose what they do. Who knows what they do?
1:10:56
They You do also like they also Look, they do think I know I know that for example for a fact that what TikTok is doing right now what TikTok is doing right now is so they So, TikTok grew with a few major kind of creators who you know, got hundreds of millions of followers.
1:11:11
And TikTok doesn't like that.
1:11:13
They don't want to be dependent on a few big creators cuz then those creators can switch.
1:11:16
And so, what they do is they then turn the dial to like support some new creators and down turn So, there's always these sort of Oz behind the curtain turning the dials on these social networks deciding kind of who wins and who loses, who gets reach, you know, what and and and all these kind of manipulation goes on.
1:11:31
Um and so anyway, so I just think that we've really gotten off path from where the internet could be um and where kind of Kevin Kelly envisioned it.
1:11:40
And you talk about the death of the middle.
1:11:42
So, if I'm thinking about I I mean, literally, I am a creator and I want to make good money as a creator.
1:11:50
I don't want to sacrifice income at least I mean, I don't I don't need to be a billionaire, but I don't want to sacrifice income meaningfully.
1:11:55
I don't want to, you know, pick table scraps, you know, in my wooden shack or something.
1:12:01
How should I be thinking about my career as a creator in terms of where the internet is evolving?
1:12:09
Yeah, there's a lot of That's a multi-layered question.
1:12:10
So, first let me talk about death of the middle.
1:12:12
Death of the middle is a is a common pattern in technology.
1:12:17
I'll give you an example, retail.
1:12:17
Okay, so uh with the rise of the internet.
1:12:20
So, before the internet, you had these big department stores like JCPenney and Sears and you also had, you know, of course like more like uh you know, high high-end boutique out outlets and things like this and Walmart.
1:12:31
Um and what the internet did is it sort of killed the middle, death of the middle.
1:12:35
And so, what that means is JCPenney and Sears and all the kind of Kmart's uh if they didn't go bankrupt, they're soon to go bankrupt.
1:12:41
And what it rewarded was the two edges.
1:12:43
The People call it also barbell.
1:12:47
Hyper-scale, Amazon and Walmart.
1:12:47
Why they succeed in that world, right?
1:12:51
Because they are just the most cost effective, they can invest in robotic factories and all these other kinds of things they do.
1:12:56
And on the other end of the spectrum, like the ultra like high-touch boutiques, so like Gucci, LVMH.
1:13:02
And by the way, not a coincidence that I think the two richest people in the world are or two of the top five, Jeff Bezos on the one hand and Pinault on the other, who's LVMH, which is a roll up of it's a private equity style roll up of those high-end boutiques, right?
1:13:15
And so so those two ends of the of the of the spectrum worked well.
1:13:18
Like by the way, I think this happened in media with you know, the book industry has done like I I'd ask my friends in the book industry when I wrote this book and like how's the book industry doing?
1:13:28
And they get pretty good.
1:13:28
It's actually stayed pretty much fine throughout the internet.
1:13:31
Like the internet it changes, you know, there's book talk and how people find books, but it hasn't I think the revenues of the book industry have grown a little bit or flat, like it hasn't disrupted the book industry, right?
1:13:41
Um whereas, you know, and and then so what succeeded in the internet era?
1:13:45
It's on the one hand long very long form books.
1:13:49
On the other hand, very the opposite end of the spectrum, like to 20-second TikToks.
1:13:53
And 140 or now I guess, you know, 400 character tweets or whatever, right?
1:13:58
Like the two ends of the spectrum.
1:14:00
What has died, we were talking about earlier, unfortunately, is sort of in the middle. Like, right?
1:14:03
It's blogging, it's certainly magazines that Sports Illustrated just announced they're shutting down. Like Yeah, yeah.
1:14:10
So like where they laid everybody off. Yeah, no.
1:14:11
I mean, so like that industry outside of maybe the high photo quality ones like Vogue is basically decimated.
1:14:17
Like a lot of the in media.
1:14:19
So that's the middle, like middle length, middle quality, middle investment.
1:14:22
Like you can define There's nuances to how you define it.
1:14:24
And so the by the way, I think a simple model, I'm not saying this right, but it's a first good first guess is like what will AI do to writing?
1:14:34
Like ChatGPT, probably death of the middle. Right?
1:14:37
Which means if you're super high-end, if you're, you know, a a great author or you know, a great publication or some one other kind of thing, you're probably okay.
1:14:45
I mean, I don't think people buy, you know, like, you know, high-end fiction for They they buy it for the writing, but they also it's important to them that it's written by a person.
1:14:56
And there's a human connection.
1:14:58
There's a status thing, too.
1:14:59
Hey, because when you go to the party, you can't go to an Upper East Side party and Well, there's a community thing.
1:15:03
And like look, people talk about this, too.
1:15:06
Like with che- an interesting an interesting case study, right?
1:15:07
Chess, I think computers got better than machine Sorry, computers got better than humans in chess what, like 20 years ago or something?
1:15:14
Chess is more popular than ever on the internet by by a significant margin.
1:15:18
And people like watching other people play chess, and they don't watch computers play chess, right?
1:15:22
So, they're not watching for the pure quality of the game, cuz if you did, you'd just watch AIs fight each other, play each other.
1:15:29
Um they're watching for It's the whole thing.
1:15:31
Humans like humans, right?
1:15:31
And I think that will remain the case with art.
1:15:34
I I think that it will mean that it becomes more important that you lean into the community, the status, the humanity of it, right?
1:15:40
Like that you really Like that you're reading this person writing about it. Like that matters.
1:15:46
Yeah, I'll tell you sort of when I had a smart entrepreneur ask me the other day.
1:15:50
He said, "AI could really hurt your business, and I've been working on this piece with you.
1:15:58
We're working on one together."
1:15:58
And he said, "How should I be thinking about this piece differently in terms of AI's around?"
1:16:04
And I said, "Here's what it is.
1:16:06
You got to focus on two things.
1:16:09
First, you need a great insight.
1:16:09
And one way to find a great insight is that AI disagrees with you.
1:16:13
Then AI as a sort of consensus calibration mechanism.
1:16:20
You think of AI as the average of the internet in a way, yeah. AI thinks you're wrong.
1:16:23
So, we'll use that as a starting point.
1:16:24
So, we can use AI for a definition there.
1:16:26
So, you need a great insight, and then, like your book, it needs to be supported by firsthand knowledge.
1:16:33
Deep firsthand knowledge where you can write about that knowledge, and it comes through that you've really been there through the depths of your observations, the clarity of your thinking.
1:16:42
And then, what I would say that you have to do I love what you just said, humans like humans.
1:16:45
What then you got to do is layer on a personal component.
1:16:49
I don't just want to hear your data, your insights, your all that stuff.
1:16:54
I want to hear a personal story.
1:16:56
When you were in the board room, when you were founding your company, when you went you sold your product to Whole Foods for the first time, what was that like? How did that feel?
1:17:02
And if you can think through that deep insight that AI disagrees with you on, simple idea, your core idea, one line, and you can layer personal stories with that, that human-to-human connection, I think you're good to go.
1:17:15
I think that's also closely connected I agree with you and I think it's also closely connected to what I was calling earlier authenticity. Yep.
1:17:23
Cuz I think authenticity too, like your humanity shows through and people are very I think especially modern people who are just consuming information all day, I think they're very good at detecting inauthentic things.
1:17:33
I I don't know, I just I maybe I'm overestimating them, but I think people can just immediately tell is that authentic or is that like do I have a feeling I'm being sold something? Yep.
1:17:42
And so I think that's part of it too is that that like part of the showing your humanity is being authentic and vulnerable and complex and nuanced and multifaceted and all the other kinds of things, right?
1:17:50
And personal and telling stories and So so I think so I think in a so I think just the first pass not not having, you know, it's a crystal ball is that things like AI like AI is going to be important, it's going to grow, it's a big deal.
1:18:05
Um it's the the you know, we are probably at a um a kind of infle- a year ago was an inflection point like the thing about it is like we already know these models are good, but we also know that when you just basically throw more data and compute at these models, which is happening, they get better.
1:18:22
And so there's sort of a there's a what they call a scaling laws, which is that they you know, that the that the sort of the IQ of the system goes up with more GPUs and data and they're and at some point that will everything asymptotes.
1:18:36
Every everything in the world basically at some point has some point at which it there's diminishing returns.
1:18:41
But then we're not at that point yet.
1:18:43
And so that will get better.
1:18:45
That will change writing.
1:18:45
I think I think there's some really interesting stuff.
1:18:48
Um Like there's work being done where it's sort of co-pilot uh work meaning and I think this is maybe very likely in the future where you can um have a very smart kind of assist AI assistant writing that will help people.
1:19:02
Um and uh you know, it will recall notes, recall things you read, suggest relevant things. Recall state.
1:19:12
We're talking about state.
1:19:14
How great would it be if as you're doing your rewrite, the AI can track the state of what the reader knows. yes.
1:19:20
This this concept has already been explained.
1:19:23
That would have been incredibly useful.
1:19:25
Um I look, I would have just liked something that's like a more advanced like, "Hey, you're using some passive voice."
1:19:29
Like just reminders of writing.
1:19:31
"Hey, maybe this clause should go over here."
1:19:32
You know, just like a smart editor.
1:19:34
Like I would think that would be really useful.
1:19:35
I actually found I tried a little bit of ChatGPT on the book. It's funny.
1:19:38
My friend of mine sends a friend of mine.
1:19:39
He's like, "I I never thought to do this."
1:19:41
He said, "I I ran it What's it called? Zero GPT?
1:19:43
I ran your thing through a GPT checker and you scored what 0% or one like meaning on plagiarism."
1:19:49
It was Well, it wasn't plagiarized.
1:19:50
It was Was it written by a machine?
1:19:51
And apparently I was It was clear to my nerd friend that it was not written by a machine.
1:19:55
I thought, "Well, that's good cuz it wasn't."
1:19:57
But I did I did of course play around with ChatGPT during it.
1:19:59
And didn't And I found it like it's amazing technology.
1:20:03
It's very good, but was not my voice and it was not of the quality I wanted to write, but but it will get much better.
1:20:08
But I think this co-pilot kind of use case is really exciting.
1:20:12
And I think to your vision of getting more people to write, I think that could be a very powerful um way to do that.
1:20:19
I think the you know, I would much rather see the co-pilot vision cuz I feel like if it's just written by ChatGPT and it's more like people like you're just going to it's going to get really not It's not going to be good. Like I don't think.
1:20:29
I think I think you need to keep like we need to find the right balance between the things machines are good at, which is like you said like recalling, "Did you already say this?"
1:20:37
Helping you with tactical rewrites.
1:20:42
But I think if you have the machine do all of it, you're going to at least for the near term, maybe the machines will get so magical at some point, but at least in the near term you're going to lose the voice and the human humanity of it.
1:20:51
Well, the other thing that I would love to think through with you, and we can probably end the podcast here, is the thing that I would like to see change about the internet is no more recency bias in the way that we have it now.
1:21:06
We have the dial-up really high.
1:21:09
And I would like to see places on the internet where we don't, for example, I would love to see a Twitter feed that shows me basically all the tweets that I've liked and bookmarked, and they just repopulate repopulate space repetition.
1:21:21
Why am I not seeing a great tweet from you from 2013 and somebody else from 2016?
1:21:26
Yeah, I mean I guess the question is like the pushback to that argument would like is it the systems or is it the people?
1:21:31
Like in other words, like I'm just giving you the steel manning the counterargument, which is that they that maybe, you know, look, we tried that, maybe Facebook would say, and it just turns out people want the new stuff, you know.
1:21:41
And and and what I would say back is that the architecture, it might be true that it is what people want, but to me it's what people want in the same way that people want sugar and processed foods. Yeah, I see.
1:21:54
And yes, this to me is a big problem with markets that what people want in the now is not the same as what people want over the long time horizon of their life, which is not the same as what's good for society.
1:22:07
And I agree, it is what gets engagement.
1:22:10
There's no doubt about it, but to the reason why this is so important is if we can create a place where people can consistently find great works, then people can benefit from a really well-written piece over much longer time horizon.
1:22:27
So, if someone writes a great Twitter thread at this point, it's only going to be shown in the feed for 48 hours.
1:22:33
What does it look like to have something shown in the feed for the next 10 years? Cuz it's worthy of that.
1:22:39
It's worthy of being shared and being read repeatedly.
1:22:41
I mean, like I would argue part of this is the is is sort of the topic of my book, which is so the, you know, part of my theme is that that the that that the other network design, so if you look at the web, the web is a vertical network, like the web doesn't have the same recency bias.
1:22:56
Um that there, you know, that if you go look at the usage of websites, it's much more uniformly distributed across the age of the website.
1:23:05
Um than the people reading on Twitter or something.
1:23:10
So, a lot of this is that you have these companies controlling these networks and they are optimizing for things that aren't just, you know, that are that are basically they're optimizing for profit motives.
1:23:19
Um and so, they're optimizing for quick engagement and kind of sugar highs as if as you will.
1:23:23
Um So, I do think that is part of the problem.
1:23:26
I don't think I think it's complex though because I think it's also like look, I think part of the problem is like look, if you look at people's diets, like when they first introduced sugary cereal, I you know, I grew up like it just everyone ate sugary cereal, like and then over time people realized there were trade-offs.
1:23:43
And I do think we're in this period where like social media just kind of have I mean, it's been around for 15 years, but really only as a mass medium for less than a decade really that the masses got on.
1:23:54
And so, everyone rushes in and grabs a sugar cereal.
1:23:56
And then I think over time I what I hope is that as a society we kind of come back and find a balance, right?
1:24:03
Um and sort of say, "Okay, like in the same way, you know, now there's a sort of big, at least in the tech world I'm in, there's the whole kind of Andrew Huberman like like optimization Yeah, optimization, like eat certain diets, like I'm like this, I'm kind of like high protein and don't drink and all these other things.
1:24:20
And like I have a lot of my friends are like that, and so, you know, it's not like always fun.
1:24:26
Like, you, you know, to to do that, but you, over time, you realize, wait a second, this is not sustainable way to live.
1:24:31
And I think that people will make it to that point, too, with social media and things. I do.
1:24:34
Like, I like I have a rule for myself that I have to read 50 pages of a book every day.
1:24:40
Um, and that and that's part of this is to not use social media, um, and to get off the computer.
1:24:44
And, you know, just always spend time on sort of I think of books as kind of the protein of, um, of the mind, and social media, in many cases, is sugar.
1:24:55
And if I don't go and sort of have rules around that, and and I often find like the first 5 minutes, sometimes I'm distracted and everything else, but then I get in the flow, and actually, the reason I have the 50-page rule is that um, often, after I read 50 pages, I want to read another 50 pages, so it's like it's enough time to force me to kind of get off the sugar. Um I love that. Yeah.
1:25:13
And so, I think people will My hope is that that people will grapple with these things over time and find a better balance.
1:25:17
We're we're out of whack right now, I think.
1:25:20
Well, I think we can close here, cuz I thought this was a hilarious anecdote.
1:25:23
And this is a benefit of printed books is I remembered where on the page I read it, so I could look at my little stickies, and it basically could narrow down.
1:25:32
But, I thought this was really interesting, that discovering the real power, the real powers of a new medium takes time.
1:25:38
When Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the movable type printing press, published his namesake Bible in the 15th century, he made it look like a handmade manuscript copy.
1:25:51
Who could imagine anything else?
1:25:51
And it was only about 150 years later that we ended up thinking of that we ended up realizing that the printing press would lead to science and, um, scientific and political revolution.
1:26:08
And that that's a that's a that's part of a passage talking about generally, with whenever there's new media, there's a transition period, and I call it sort of I distinction I use is comes from Steve Jobs, is skeuomorphic versus native technologies.
1:26:19
There are um and so, you know, like the early plays, sorry, early films around 1905 or something What are the plays?
1:26:28
they took plays and they filmed them and then they, you know, and then the um you know, the the like I mean, a whole bunch of technologies sort of developed.
1:26:35
The early internet was like um you know, if you look at the '90s internet, it was like magazine brochures and catalogs and it was all sort of taking these ideas from from the offline world because you didn't people hadn't fully figured it out yet.
1:26:48
And books were like that, too.
1:26:50
So, yeah, the original books look like monk scribes and and and the use case was what else would you do with it but but the Bible.
1:26:56
And of course, later on, you have, you know, fast forward, you know, you have all these guys writing, you know, anonymous letters during the American Revolution and all the other kinds of you know, things that happened um you know, dramatic things that happened through the written word in the next couple hundred years.
1:27:12
So, And books like this, hey Chris, congratulations. Read, Write, Own.
1:27:16
I really enjoyed this book and I agree with you strongly that there's a few things that are deeply off about the modern technological sphere and it's time to change those things.
1:27:29
So, thanks for writing this. Thank you, David. Appreciate it.