49: Jasmine Sun - Close Enough to See Clearly

23:52I made it on my phone. I remember where I was like lying awake at night in my bed and I was just feeling unsettled about the piece. And I was like, you know, what's really frustrating is like I've done this work to try to take these conversations happening in whisper networks and private conversations and to make them public. But even the things that I'm quoting publicly are in some ways less extreme than what I hear privately. How do I communicate that? And then I was like, you know what? I'll just go for the meta. I'll just literally add a parenthetical. That's like, just so you guys know, like people are more pessimistic when they are in private.

24:23And I could not get the same people to say the things on the record.

24:29Your main beat, I think, to be overly generalized would be San Francisco and Silicon Valley culture. There's this kind of fascinating thing where on one hand, you've called San Francisco are the most happening-ist place in the world. Notably not a word. Fair. It's one of, if not the most important places in the world. You've compared places in China in a similar way. On one hand, you have the traditional media who doesn't really know how, they're both mad at San Francisco and don't totally know how to actually talk about it. And then on the flip side, San Francisco doesn't really know how to talk about itself.

25:06And so in some sense, you've become this sort of translator across these two worlds. On one hand, you're doing a little bit of the Didion thing from reporting from the inside. And in another way, I think a lot of people from the outside looking in might be like, oh, she's one of those people. You're friends with the people who work at all these labs, and yet you're not among them. I'm curious, like, what you've noticed about that divide, especially as you try to bridge... Granted, like, when you're writing on Substack, you're probably writing more... It's San Francisco talking to itself. When you're writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, you're sort of, like, reporting from within.

25:40but like, what does that tension feel like? How does it come up when you talk to other journalists who are maybe less on the inside? It feels like you're in a pretty load-bearing position. I know that's a lot of different ideas at once, but. Yeah, it's interesting.

26:00I think that a lot of my role in general has been doing various forms of translation between the tech industry and the external world. I mean, for example, I used to work at Substack and I was a product manager, but I also helped out a lot with comms and product marketing and things like that. And I spent a lot of time doing things like writing blog posts that explained why we would attach a social network to the precious newsletter ecosystem because most writers are extremely suspicious of tech companies and social media and algorithms and AI. And part of my role was to make the case for why it actually might be values aligned and good to do that.

26:41And so I feel like because I personally feel very half in, half out with the tech industry, like I worked in the tech industry, I do have a lot of friends in the tech industry. There are a lot of things I really love about Silicon Valley, actually. And I think I have this simultaneous suspicion that comes from the parts of myself that are maybe more engaged with journalism and politics and whatever. It creates a tension within myself, And then it also creates this desire for like, why won't my friends get along? Why won't the people I talk to like, like each other more? Like I want them to like each other more.

27:14And so I think - Are both sides skeptical of you? Or have you found it? On the outside looking in, it seems that you've, I mean, part of it is that your work is good, but you've done a pretty good job of having both sides feel like you're not too swung to the other side. I mean, I try my best. I think like, like, I think part of it is like, how do you maintain genuine independence, right? Like, and how do you make sure that you don't seem like a shill for whether it's effective altruism or the tech industry or like the progressive left or like you could like, there are all of these tribes and all of these camps.

27:47And one thing that frustrates me about a lot of the Silicon Valley new media world or even just sub-stacks and stuff is like they're not really doing journalism or truth-seeking. They're doing advocacy for their camp. Like this is a progress studies sub-stack. This is a rationalist blogger. This is a new media thing celebrating the spirit of enterprise or Anderson Horowitz or whatever. But both, like most of, a lot of that at least is Silicon Valley talking to itself. Yeah. Which I, is it worth delineating like there's Silicon Valley talking to itself and then there's like Silicon Valley trying to do propaganda maybe.

28:23Sure. They don't do a lot of it. Okay. Okay. I guess. So you're more talking about when it's Silicon Valley talking to itself. Yeah. I mean, but the, hmm. What was the original question? The original question was pretty open-ended, which is like, what does it feel like to be this load-bearing translator between these two worlds? And maybe inside of that question, to be honest, is like, there aren't a lot of you. One hypothesis I had, I think maybe I was even talking to Selena about this in terms of what I should talk to you about. Maybe you have to kind of appreciate something to be able to really see it clearly.

29:03Oh, absolutely, yeah. And so maybe that's one of the reasons you're able to occupy this space well, which is that you, if you loved it more, you'd probably be working in an anthropic. And if you loved it less, as most journalists do, which is a super overgeneralization, they're just like, like, stay away. And so it's some. Yeah, I mean, I think so. I actually think that's a really good point. Selene should really do the talking for me. I think when you love something, you want to understand it and you want it to be understood. I think part of this is what I said about trying to observe without judgment a lot of the time.

29:36Like when I think about my reporting and I interview someone, even if like internally I might have very different beliefs than that person. To me, the mission of doing journalism or doing the kind of journalism I do at least is to capture their belief. Like a thing I am reporting on is the essence of what they believe. And like even if I can only get one or two sentences into my inner into my final piece because you just have to cut a lot of it. I never want them to look at that and feel like she was cherry picking. I want them to look at that and think that was the essence of the thing I said.

30:05So even in some pieces I've written that have been really controversial. So there's, this is from a while ago, but about a year ago, I did a piece on the defense tech revival at Stanford. Like why do all these students want to work at Anderle and Palantir now is basically the question I came up with. And I interviewed a lot of people working at defense tech companies about why they did it. And I wrote them up in a piece. and it was really interesting, the reaction, because the people who I interviewed, when they read the piece before any public reaction, they liked it. They were like, this is an accurate representation of my views.

30:37You asked me why I want to work at these places and I said, it's because I care about Ukraine or I think that more women should work in national security or whatever it is, or one of them, the lines that went viral was, all of my most moral and effective friends work at Palantir, because this was a genuine belief that this person held. And so when she read my story, I wasn't cherry picking. My goal was, in fact, to represent exactly what the person said in its full essence. The public reaction is a different question. The public reaction to that piece was, these kids are murderers. And thus you tricked me.

31:10The feeling of the person who maybe gave the quote might end up being you tricked me, even though it wasn't distant. Yeah, I mean, it was a psychologically challenging thing for me because I wasn't trying to trick them. I wasn't trying to throw them to the wolves. And I also quoted quite a wide range of things. And, but like, it was really important to me that at least public reaction aside, they would not feel tricked. If they feel only feel tricked after the public reaction, that's very different. Right. But like, I think that like both when I talk to people in Silicon Valley or I talk to people and other in politics or whatever, it's like, I want them to feel like I have captured them and I have created a portrait.

31:47I've taken a photograph that feels like correct and true, regardless of what the reaction is after. And like that to me, if I hold to that, I think that people will give me a little more credit. And then I think, of course, there are things that I really like a lot of things about Silicon Valley. And I think people can see that. I also have a lot of skepticism. I think people can see that. And I'm pretty open about my personal beliefs. I write opinions on a blog. And And so before people chat, I feel like they can get a pretty good sense of who I am and how fair I am. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think Silicon Valley struggles so much to talk to the rest of the world about itself?

32:32Two things. I think one is they don't try. And two is I think that there is a genuine self-selection for a different set of values here. So I don't think they try. They try less now than they used to. They used to try harder. in the like tech for good, Google, whatever era. Silicon Valley tried a bit harder and it worked sometimes. I think that like, if you look at, for example, like going direct, like Lulu's thing, like I respect Lulu a lot, Lulu's very sharp. Going direct work for particular goals, which was that Lulu was like, you should identify your audience. Oftentimes your audience is say recruits.

33:07Like if you're an AI company, you want to recruit the best talent or you want to land very specific enterprise deals. And so she was saying rather than cultivating your messaging to the broad public, you should direct your marketing and your messaging towards a very specific group of people, and that'll be much more effective. I think she was right about that. But sometimes the things that you say to convince a bunch of very odd AI researchers to join your lab, when the rest of the world hears that, they're like, dude, what the fuck? And so I think there's an extent to which the insularity and the fact that Silicon Valley spends most of its time messaging to itself, to investors, to potential recruits, to enterprise tech companies that might like make a purchase or something means that they don't know how they sound to everyone else because they're not trying to message to the public.

33:54They feel like my business is not contingent on whether the public likes me. It's not like Coca-Cola, you know, Coca-Cola needs to be public to like me. But like a lot of these companies don't, especially at the beginning before say OpenAI had a product, They weren't a consumer product for like the first five years or whatever. And so they didn't need to talk to anyone else. Sam Alman could write these blog posts that say AI might make the world worse off and like shift all the power from labor to capital. And that honesty might be really respected by these very AGI-pilled researchers. At the point where now you're trying to IPO and you need the investors and the public to like you, it becomes a lot more troubling.

34:29And I think that's one of the tensions they're coming up against. And then the second thing is that I think the values of Silicon Valley are genuinely very different from the values of the broad American public. Of course, everyone wants like welfare and happiness and whatever. But one is that San Francisco is an industry town. And what it means is that people come here oftentimes because they want to be part of a specific culture and subgroup, right? Like you have these nerds who felt really misunderstood in the places they grew up in their other contexts. Maybe they didn't fit into their university, their institution, and they thought, oh, here's a group of people who will appreciate me.

35:05Here's a group of people who will appreciate how good I am at coding, how high agency I am, my idealism where other places might have a tall poppy syndrome and they're trying to cut me down. But basically you really concentrate a group of people who have quite similar personality characteristics and drives. It's not actually a very good representation of the overall population. And I'll notice this in things like when people describe their, say, post-AGI utopias, They'll talk about wanting to live forever or wanting UBI so that they can engage in leisure all day And there are public polls of Americans on living forever and UBI and none of them are very popular Yeah, right like it's just like like how are like it's like oh You can have a superhuman tutor in your pocket and you can just get like tutored in math by the equivalent of I don't know Like Terrence Tao in your pocket and I'm like how many Americans really want Terrence Tao in their pocket?

35:56If you ask them what utopia look like some of them but actually not that many right a lot of people want jobs People like feeling like they have a purpose. And so there's also a genuine way in which even when Silicon Valley attempts to message about, say, these positive narratives around AI, they don't realize what really matters to people. And that actually maybe living forever and not having a job is not everyone's idea of the good life. Isn't like you could you could paint a similar version of that for just coastal elites or like, why do you think this is so much more true in San Francisco?

36:24or maybe it isn't so much more true, but why do you think this is so much more true in San Francisco than New York or LA or London or other hubs where people from all over the world flock to for ambitious reasons or otherwise? I mean, New York and LA and DC will suck in their own ways, right? Like the out of touch politicians, the Brooklyn media class, all Hollywood movies are actually secretly about Hollywood. You know, like it's definitely, I think, true for every industry. I think the other thing maybe is that storytelling and messaging is generally undervalued in Silicon Valley. Like if you just think of some of the traits that are valued in people, it's like oftentimes being like a nerd is associated with being like kind of prickly and bad at communication and like hard to work with.

37:12But like you're like a genius. So it's OK. Right. and at least in these other in New York, LA, and DC I think being likable and broadly likable is seen as a more appealing thing whereas I actually think sometimes you lose points in Silicon Valley but this is changing by the way it is changing especially I mean the funny thing is you were making the point about how these companies never have to use to have to talk to the rest of the world like if anything it feels like Silicon Valley is competing on brand more than ever on charisma more than ever like all these on new media oh totally yeah It's great.

37:45It's great for us. Right. But it's so funny. I mean, like when I my interest in Silicon Valley was roughly 2017. I went to Stanford and at the time, like being interested in like writing and sociology and stuff like this is very low status. Like no one gave a fuck about this. Right. Like everyone's like you should just code. And it's really stupid that you can't code. Right. And now losers. I know who's getting automated now. But it's these these things change. But because of this, like the media ecosystem here is really new. It's really young. It's still figuring itself out. Like I think new media can figure itself out, but it's gonna take some years They're coming up against these hundred year old institutions on the East Coast And also like another thing I think about all the time.

38:26There are like very few journalists who live in San Francisco This is what I think about all the time just like by numbers There are so few journalists who live in San Francisco relative to how important it is as a center of even just like power and wealth Right Like there are so many people who report on San Francisco from New York and DC and like to me for example The idea of reporting on the White House from San Francisco would be insane I wouldn't trust a White House reporter who never went to the happy hours with all of the staffers, right? like and in DC you also have this much more Integrated and in a way like mutually beneficial ecosystem between sources and reporters where like they are going to the same happy hours, hanging out in the same social scenes, whatever.

39:08So one, it means that you have better, the reporters have better story taste because they start to hear about things early, right? They're actually like in the scenes where they hear about stuff. That's intuition almost. It's actually just like, the temperature got hotter or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, I feel like that's what I do here. It's like, oh, I can like feel when the temperature goes up on something in a way that maybe a reporter in New York can't. But it also means that you have like more of a pact and more trust where like, I think politicos understand that there are ways to work with reporters in ways that is advantageous to them better, right?

39:40It's like, I can feed you my side of a story on background, and that might actually be better for the way that you portray this in the public eye. And also because there's some, like, shared social tissue, it kind of means that you're not going to burn me so bad that, like, in a deeply unfair way most of the time, because it is going to screw everything else up. Whereas here, I think like most people in technology know zero journalists personally, and there's just a default distrust. And I think that distrust is even partly warranted because the journalists kind of like, they're not in those rooms.

40:13They don't really know how they're thinking. There isn't really an advantage to telling somebody who has no context your side of the story and then being taken out of that context and being painted as a villain. And I think that's what happens with a lot of tech journalism. them. Is all of speaking of sort of different audiences, you have these amazing kind of flagship pieces in big publications that are certainly speaking more. Here's what's going on in Silicon Valley from the inside to the rest of the world. And then you have your sub stack, which is obviously much more inside baseball, not necessarily speaking directly to Silicon Valley, although I would, I would guess it leans that more that way.

40:52Is all of your writing journalism? I don't think so I think a lot of the subsec is not journalism It's just What is it? How do you think about what it is?

41:07Writing It's all writing I like the word writer because I like how expansive and big tent it is And I like that it's also kind of understated Like journalist comes with baggage Very serious, capital J Blogger is almost too diminutive It's not serious enough writer to me is like I love how big tent it is and I love that it contains so many things within it like as you know like writing has research and writing has the craft of writing and there's so many things um I guess with subsec I don't really think about what it is I don't think about myself as writing in a form like it's really loose some of them are travelogues some of them are basically columns or op-eds yeah some of them are interviews that I transcribe like I'm really not thinking very hard about the forum.

41:51Subsec is just, um, it's very Jasmine though. It's very like, not, not always parasocial or that kind of thing, but it's very like your lens of the world, which some of your other writing is not. It's very like, there's a glass pane. Oh, totally. Yeah. Like the subsec is just like, I want to take my brain and transport it onto the page. Like, I feel like, I think we had this conversation at one point. It's like, there's a bunch of stuff going on in my brain and your brain and everyone's brain. And the thing that I really love about writing and writing on the internet and writing publicly is like, I can go through the exercise of seeing how much I can turn like the weird blob of ideas into a form where it is shareable and scalable, right?

42:29Like I can take all the fuzz of ideas and concretize them. Well, it's almost a version of your notes app thing. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's all, that's all like one kind of long funnel of like the little things I've noticed in the world as I'm driving around, which by the way, most of us do, but we don't write down. Yeah. And so you've built that like. Like it goes through a filter for digestibility before it makes it onto the subsec, right? Like the notes app is like a real disaster, but like I would never share that. But I do sort of try to make it a bit digestible and then I share it because, you know, also like even before I had very many subscribers, like writing long form on the internet is one of the best ways to meet like-minded people.

43:03And I just like made a lot of friends by doing this. And so I want to share how I think because I will find people and other things that I like. With reporting and journalism, it's a much more specific thing. Like I actually do believe in a lot of the ideals of journalism with these attempts at objectivity, like you've got to talk to the sources from all sides. You go through like this, like very careful reporting process on the record, off the record, on background. You're trying to engage in a very specific practice with a set of professional norms around it. And I take those norms pretty seriously because I do think that for all of the flaws that capital J journalism sometimes has, Like when something is printed in the New York Times, you do assign it a level of credibility that me saying the meme on Substack does not have.

43:49And so like I am willing to sort of like play along with the process. And also I think it's like good for me, frankly, to like go through the process in order to produce these bigger pieces because it gives the ideas more weight. It gives it more credibility when people know that you've done all of these steps to get there. Right. It is also largely split based on audience. So like when I write in a bigger publication, oftentimes it's something that I want to share to a broader group, primarily people who are not in Silicon Valley. So there's part of that. I also like that it gets me to do more reporting.

44:20I don't report as much for my sub stack, whereas I will do just like so many more interviews and go so much deeper and go so much more rigorous when I know it's going to be printed in an outlet where I can't just like make a little edit like the day after because I changed my mind. I will say some of your favorite, some of my favorite pieces of yours are the like companion pieces to the big publication in your sub stack. Like the, whatever the, the permanent underclass one, it's like the bonus episode, but like that was juicy. Like that. Um, maybe on the similar note, what maybe, and I'd actually be curious across both of those modes.

44:57What does it mean to write with integrity? And, and is it different? There's like journalistic integrity and all those things you were describing. What does it mean to write it with integrity, even in the more casual, is that something you even, because my sense is it is something you think a lot about.

45:20Yeah. I mean, I try to write things that are true.

45:27I try not to let my prior ideological affiliations get in the way of truth seeking and just like be really honest with myself about that. I try to talk to people, especially when I think I'm going to disagree with them and force myself to listen to them, which is healthy because oftentimes you do come around. I think maybe another thing is that there are probably debates in journalism about how much you should feel responsible for the outcomes of your piece and what happens once your pieces in the world. And I think some writers and journalists are very much like, I owe nothing to the world. Like I, I only, I'm here to create this thing, but I don't want to be audience captured.

46:10I don't want to be swayed by the court of public opinion. And so I write for an audience of one, which is myself and like the world do what it will. Um, I think for me, part of integrity is actually caring a bit more about what happens afterwards. Um, it just really doesn't feel good to release something that will throw your sources to the wolves or that is, I don't know, too, it's just like too casual and too loose with other people's lives. Like, I'm just like, like journalists command an incredible amount of power. Writers command an incredible amount of power. It's not wealth in the way that like working in an AI lab gives you wealth or whatever.

46:57But being able to have a microphone to like shout to like the, you know, tens of millions of subscribers of the New York Times, like, hey, guys, like, this is what I think about this issue. And this is what all these people are saying. Like, that is a huge amount of power. There are people whose entire jobs it is to get like a single mention in one of these papers. And so to me, holding that power with integrity is both like integrity as in the truth side, but also being at least aware and responsible about some of the impacts that you expect. But I think people debate about this. Well, thanks for pontificating on it.

47:35You also talked about integrity with AI recently on Substack. You said being real with yourself is the most important cognitive skill for the AI age. AI makes it easier to lie to yourself. You got to be able to honestly answer, am I actually thinking with AI or am I letting it do the hard part for me? Is this essay product business a good idea or did AI convince me it was, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think somewhere else you said, maybe like quote tweeting out, you're like, AI writing is bad for the writer, much more even so than the reader. Maybe you don't feel this way, but like my, I read this as almost like a different kind of integrity.

48:11It's like an internal integrity around whether or not you're going to cheat yourself. Yeah, yeah. how do you uh like keep yourself tethered to the right balance there even something as simple as like you were talking about i was reading you talking about using claude as an editor and like it's like hey claude i don't want you to change the writing at all like that's a great aspiration but it seems like really hard when you're like in the weeds like wow that idea from claude is pretty good maybe i should just use that sentence like yeah what are you holding on to I really don't want to make myself dumber.

48:50This is like a big fear I have in general, like Claude or no Claude, AI or no AI. Like I write because I think it makes me smarter. I think it makes me kinder. It makes me a bunch of things I want to do. Like I write full time because it helps me live the life I want to live. Yeah, I think it does. How? I think all of the reporting stuff, like just like I became a much better listener. I became a much more empathetic. most people in there don't spend hours of their lives listening to people who have very different beliefs and just focusing solely on the understanding aspect and so like for me if the end point of writing is it's almost this like selfish thing where like because my end point is selfish for me writing is like an exercise in personal development then I don't want to do anything that will hinder those goals I guess I mean I wrote that subsect note about AI because I was trying to think about all of these arguments about whether you can use AI in writing.

49:45And in a way, I'm a moderate, right? Like I use AI all the time as part of my research process. I will ask Claude for feedback on my essay structures. Like I use AI pretty regularly, but I'm like, really don't like slop. I really don't want AI to ever generate sentences or paragraphs for me. And I'm like careful about that kind of thing. And oftentimes I'll get flack from both sides. People who are like, why are you using AI at all? Like, do you hate thinking? Like, Do you like hate your human editors? Like what's wrong with you? And also people who are like Why are you discriminating against people who can't express themselves in sentences or whatever?

50:19and Or maybe even something like could is there a chance that using it more would make your writing better?

50:29Um, I mean, it's sort of a rhetorical question, but I mean, I guess it's just like

50:36with regards to the people who really don't like any AI use at all, I realized that why I don't fear being de-skilled is because the way I use AI is so effortful. And I just know what it feels like to think. And I know what it feels like to be getting better and getting worse. Like, it's not like I never use AI to be like, summarize this book for me, right? Like, Like, of course I do that sometimes, but like I don't lie to myself about the difference between reading a book and reading a summary of a book. That was true before AI too. Like I know the difference between Sparknotes saying a book and like actually reading the book.

51:11And it's kind of like if you have a, if you like plagiarize or something, like it's not like the output is bad. It's just like, you should know that you plagiarize. You should know you were cheating yourself. If you're token maxing, right? Like I was also thinking about this. So all these coders and companies that are spending all of these millions of dollars on tokens. and it's like some of those tokens are probably valuable. Some of them are making you more productive, but a lot of this is the illusion of productivity. And like you might be lying to yourself and thinking that the lines of code you write or the tokens that you use are representative of an increased level of productivity.

51:42For some people it is, other people are literally just lying to yourself. And this is the thing I kept thinking about was like AI makes it so easy to generate the illusion of thinking, the illusion of productivity, the illusion of everything being a good idea because it's so perfect at justifications. and like, if it's that powerful, the only thing that you have is like knowing whether or not in some like deep internal sense, like with that, whether or not you are doing real productive work, whether or not you are learning, whether or not you are thinking. In the same way that like, you know, if you are lifting heavy, you know, if you're pushing yourself at the gym.

52:15Yes. It's the same feeling, right? Like you can just lie to yourself if you want, but you're not going to be stronger. And I really don't want to be dumber. So I try not to lie to myself. The fear is that I think the more we use these tools, the more it will become harder to know when you're lying to yourself unless you're really vigilant. Clearly, you have a very firm boundary on that. My sense is, I mean, personally, my sense is that, like, if I'm not careful about it, the boundary is getting blurrier. I mean, maybe I'm not careful enough. like maybe you're right and like I actually am just getting dumber um because of AI that's not what I'm saying no what I'm saying is I think you're actually very very attuned to this and you're thinking about a lot and you're like yeah you have a very very um at least as you've just stated you have like a very uh writing a huge part of writing for you is to make yourself smarter yeah and like maybe that's completely true maybe that's a story you're telling yourself or whatever But I think for so many of us, as more and more of what we're doing, like most things aren't just instrumental or not.

53:23There's like, why do I do this podcast? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons I do this podcast. And I hope I keep the main thing, the main thing forever. But as more and more pieces come into the, this is probably too much of a sidebar. Like an example would be the prep I do for an interview. I don't use very much AI currently. And I think I could probably use more AI and do better interviews. but there's also a version of that where I take it too far and it's currently important that I do a good amount of it manually and so I think that's what I'm trying to point out is like it feels to me as these tools get better and better and better part of it is like I get to rely on the fact that like if I do it manually the interview is better but what if at some point Claude's research is better than mine I mean I think it's like I use the tools because I want to know like I want to know So every one of my personal evals of the AI systems is roughly once a quarter or as often as I do a freelance piece.

54:21I take my pitch and I take all of my interview transcripts and I feed them into Claude, the latest version of Gemini and the latest version of GPT. And I say, write this 3000 word New York Times article for me. Go do it. And like, to be clear, I never use any of the content. It's just an eval. So one is like, I do want to know, like, if it gets to that point. I don't think it's there yet. I feel like I'm still better at writing than the AI. but I don't fear finding out. And I think that's kind of important. You don't fear finding out? No. No, I really don't. Which is like, you could know that it's going to write a better one than you and you still feel confident that you're going to write it yourself.

54:57Yeah, because I want to be smarter. Like, again, like I just like, like it's very - I think that's a really powerful articulation though of like, we're all going to have to find some version of this or else - You just can't be fully instrumental about it in that sense, right? Like it just can't be about the output alone. It has to be like, I actually believe that writing for me is a process of personal self-development. And so that's why, like with cheating in school, right? You can cheat on your homework and maybe you guarantee that your teacher is never gonna find out that you cheated on your homework, that you used AI, whatever.

55:29But like, you're not gonna be able to do stuff later. I just like really don't wanna be that person. And so I think that's just what it is. I try to, again, I like, I use AI plenty. Um, I, but like for me, I know that I, it makes me less lazy actually. So when I didn't have AI tools, um, and somebody said a word, I didn't really know what it meant. Or like I was interviewing someone and they're explaining some complicated economic concept or like refer to some paper. Um, I would, there's a lot of the time where I probably would have just ignored. Bounce off. Yeah. Bounce off me. I don't care. Whatever.

56:04Um, and I would just never, because I didn't have the time to go find out. I didn't have the time to like read a really complex paper or like learn a totally new discipline. And now I think like my, by lowering the bar to like learning a little bit about something, I'm like way more likely to like look stuff up to be like, okay, like, can you summarize this paper for me? And like, I know that the net amount of learning I'm doing is more than it was before. Um, I still am very aware that summarize this paper is not the same as actually reading the paper. Uh, but like, it just feels pretty clear to me personally.

56:34And I think this is what I was struggling so hard to articulate in that note is like, I don't know how to give any advice besides be real with yourself. Like you just got to know if you were doing the work, you just have to know. I, again, I think the challenge, everyone is going to have to calibrate themselves on what that actually means. And part of it is that like most of us or many people are mostly doing things instrumentally and they haven't actually like stopped to say like, what is the thing I want to do? Even if like the computer can do it better. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why, like, I always think back to like AlphaGo, right.

57:06And that, that story has so much resonance for so many people over so many years. Like it's been, it's been, we're at like the 10th anniversary of the least at all match. And, um, people still talk about that match as more so than they talk about a lot of other milestones in AI that have happened since, because I think this very specific experience of like, we are going to watch the machines excel at the thing that we do. We're going to watch them beat us. And we are still going to have to ask ourselves, do we want to play anyway? Right. And one of the things that I find really beautiful about games, and I know you interviewed C.

57:36and like I love his games agency as art book, is that like you are playing them to exercise your own agency. You're playing them to develop a set of skills. You are not playing a board game because you're going to win money from the board game or because it's going to accelerate your career. Maybe friends, like you could say that the instrumental thing that you get is like you get to bond with your friends or something. But like everything is going to become a little bit more like playing board games soon. And you are just gonna have to choose, do I want to do this for its own sake? He makes this great point.

58:07He's talking about like playing a board game with his wife. And he's like, on one hand, we both have to try to win. We can't like not care. But if I go spend all this time separately when we're not playing, like studying strategy guides and getting so much better than her, it's not going to be fun anymore either. Yeah. No, I love his work. So much is more than a board game. Especially right now, like there's so much to it. I've thought a bit about what are the books that I would recommend to people for the age of AI that are not actually about AI and Games Agency Azur is one of them because I think that's the disposition we're going to need.

58:42I think you're right. A couple of final things on the sub stack versus maybe the serious writing stuff. You wrote in your end of year recap, kind of the start of this year, that you were going to try to dial up, I think it was like 40 % sub stack last year and like 80 % this year. Yeah, but I didn't do it. Didn't do it. Why? And what are you thinking about for the second half of the year? I know. I mean, I need to, oh God. Yeah, it's really interesting. Because I worked at Subsec for a long time and more so like I was more brought up as a blogger on the internet than I, I've never worked in a newsroom.

59:18I've never been like really trained in journalism in that way. My default loyalty is the independent media and the independent ecosystem. At the same time, I think that partly with AI in particular, I've come to believe that the legacy media and telling good stories about AI and the legacy media is a lot more important. And so I think it actually comes from a sense of like, it's less about me and my preference. And it's, yeah, I think more of it is a sense of duty, more of it's about a sense of public impact, where I think that there are not that many AI journalists. There are not that many AI journalists in San Francisco.

59:57I do feel like there are certain stories that I can tell that other journalists aren't equipped to. and I should exercise that by trying to portray certain ideas in the biggest medium possible where it can reach the most number of people and that's not my sub stack. And so I've become a lot more open to doing more freelance work. I think that it is true that there's just nothing that compares to say the reach that the New York Times has. Like it is incomparable. just the amount of attention, discourse, action that comes out of writing a big New York Times piece. And it feels really important right now, given how polarized Silicon Valley is from the rest of the world, given the AI backlash, given all of these things, to spend time trying to bridge that gap to do the translation work.

1:00:49If that's the case, could you make a case that there are other mediums other than writing that would be higher impact? even so like um Ezra Klein's sure spending a lot of time podcasting oh yeah absolutely or or even something like the abundance book and like I mean Derek um we go you write the book to go on the podcast right right you drop the boulder in the lake and it's about the ripples like if if if you were thinking about it purely instrumentally and the goal is to like the world needs to better understand what's happening in San Francisco um why is a great big highly reported piece every quarter of the right shape for that now?

1:01:29So one is like, I write the piece and then I do spend the next month of it going on podcasts, going to conferences, giving talks and talking to people about the piece. So I'm very aware that writing is not the thing that reaches the most number of people, though in mediums like that, we're still probably talking like 10 million or something. Like it's still a pretty big number. but one is like I have really You were the Sunday issue the permanent underclass was like the headline for the Sunday issue, right? Yeah, it was Sunday opinion cover Peptides with Sunday business cover my sense, they didn't tell me the numbers but my sense is like 10 million-ish would not be surprising to me and so it definitely reached people even though it was writing and then beyond that the reason that I write less than other writers so most full-time writers write more often than I do whereas I devote more time to going on podcasts because I agree that most people are not going to read the writing.

1:02:21And then so you do have to get the message out in as many mediums as possible. And I'm very comfortable doing that. And I want to like, I want to do it. I see as part of the work that if I do all this research, I want as many people to hear about it as possible. I mean, the reason that I start with writing is basically because I think it makes me the smartest. That's basically it. It's like, I like the process. It's going to make the idea the most solid too to build on. Yeah. Like you just, you synthesize. And we talked about podcasts are very exploratory. Writing is sort of like synthesizing and they're both really interesting.

1:02:46I like doing both. And so like for me, when I'm reporting and interviewing, I'm in exploratory mode. Then I like bring it back in again, compress it down into a single like 3000 word piece or whatever. And then I go broad again when I go and have all these conversations about it. But like that feels like the best thing for my learning as well as for the impact. And also, finally, a lot of important people still read. Like most people don't read, but I would probably argue that among people with influence in business and politics and media and tech, a lot of the most influential people are still big readers.

1:03:17one of your uh you you gave this subsec talk uh or talk at the subsec event recently um about ai and writing and so on one of your lessons or points was that the value of polish is going to go down and the value of charisma and style and weirdness is going to go up uh in some sense that would describe your two forms of writing which is like new york times atlantic stuff is very polished frankly a lot less personality um and your subsec writing frank for me is much more fun to read um and granted some of that is i have I'm more inside baseball, I already, like, whatever. And the two go well together.

1:03:49But I was thinking about that in terms of, like, maximizing impact. Obviously, New York Times is going to be fine. The Atlantic is probably going to be fine. Most of these, the direction of travel, though, along the lines of your point would be that, if anything, we want to read more weird, stylish, charismatic writing. Yeah. And so... Do you think there's a world, maybe this is a weird way to ask the question, like, do you think there's a world where maybe in two years or three years, the writing someone like you is doing in the New York Times or the Atlantic is even more stylish? Yeah. So, yeah, I've thought about this one a lot.

1:04:23Because one is, the thing about polish is like polish, like perfect grammar, like house style, etc. Part of that is about, you know, maybe the publication as a consistent brand. But it's also because polish used to be a very good proxy for how much work you put into it. Right? Like it just meant that some human spent a lot of personal attention like being meticulous about every line every word every fact check every citation and That is becoming less and less true because very soon I'm pretty sure now actually if you like fine-tune some open-source model You could build like the New York Times house style thought you could put someone's like really crappy notes into it And out would come a piece in perfect New York Times house style No personality but perfect New York Times house style because it's very rigid like especially on the news and not the opinion side, I felt that it was basically like code syntax.

1:05:09Like every she said, every word really means something. And so if in a world where polish is no longer a very good proxy for how much work went into it, you're gonna need other proxies for like, there was a human who spent a lot of effort on this. Yeah, Katie Weaver talking about bread was not very formulaic. It was amazing, so good. Granted, subject matter matters, but like, yeah, is it so insane to imagine a future form of like real reporting looks more like, reads more like that? I hope so, actually. There's a lot of distrust in media right now from the public. And I think part of that is that they don't like that they're pretending that there's a single objective view from nowhere.

1:05:43Yes. And it would be better, I think, if reporters were a little bit more open and honest about the fact that they are people, subjectivities, and very particular emotions. And when you share that on the page, I think that people trust it more, not less. It's a fine line, but I think you're right. Yeah, like it is a fine line. I think it's more interesting. It's more engaging in a way that like perfecting your own voice and style is actually more evidence of work than having the polished thing that ChatGPTD can turn out now. So I think that's really important. Yeah. And then also just like, I've talked to editors at these legacy publications who have explicitly told me that they are trying to be more stylish.

1:06:24Like they are, I believe that the New York Times newsletters now allows their writers to write in the first person before it was unthinkable to allow a New York Times reporter to write with the word I. I like the word I. I use it a lot. And only recently have they started to think maybe in our newsletters, they can use the word I. And so I think they're coming around. Cool. All right. I want to talk a little bit about, I guess, broadly writing in Substack, but also maybe the original decision to go independent. Fun fact, you and I both started what I'm doing, what you're doing, I think the same month, November, 2024, which is a fun synchronicity.

1:07:04I think my first question on this is, and you've written about this, I think I've talked to you about this. You left a successful, I mean, you were the head of, I think like core product. I was not the head of product. I love the core product team. Led the core product team at Substack. You'd been there for a while. You were doing very well, Ascendant. And you did this theoretically very risky thing to go become an independent writer. Why was that not so risky? I think a lot of people overestimate how risky career decisions are. I mean, my thought process is fairly simple, which is that I'd spent long enough at Subsec that, and Subsec was a company people knew such that I felt that I could get another product job within a year if the writing thing didn't work out.

1:07:46And so that was basically my insurance was if I hate writing or I'm really bad at it, then in one year from now, I will say I went on sabbatical and I will just get another job as a product manager at a different startup. And I felt like pretty confident I could do that. Given that all I needed was about a year or two of runway where I'm like, okay, now let's also imagine a world where I make$0 for one or two years. Is that okay with my personal financial situation? It was fine. It's fine for frankly, most people and most people work in tech at least. And then I was like, okay, seems not that risky.

1:08:18Like I'll try it for a year. If I hate it, I'll get another job and I won't have gone into the red. When you put it like that, it sounds so simple. It is. So what is catching most people? It's very baffling to me. What do you think is catching most people? Well, so I think it's worth making a few points, which is one, it's definitely not the case that most people could quit their job for a year and be fine. Yeah, so sorry, most people working in tech who had spent the same number of years at a tech company as I did. You also, I mean, you were three years out of school, four years out of school.

1:08:49Like you weren't super established. Right, but I had like 100K in my bank account, right? Like that's all you need. why didn't you do it sooner? To flip the question back on you. Sure. I really had a sense of what I wanted to do at Substack. So before I joined Substack, so I was a sociology major in undergrad, and I spent a lot of time thinking specifically about social media governance and how the way that you design a social platform impacts the kind of information ecosystems that occur, the social dynamics, et cetera. And so it was a longtime dream of mine from when I was an undergrad to design a social media platform from scratch.

1:09:22And so I specifically joined Substack when it was still an email tool because Chris said they were going to do social media later and I really wanted to be a part of designing it. And I got to do it and I got to scale it and then people started using it and I had product market fit and there's nowhere else, nothing else that's like I wanted to do. I mean, like my team included podcasts and video, it included large publications, it included the iOS web and Android apps, like it included DMs and chat and all of that stuff. Like there wasn't really anything else that I wanted to do. I felt like the core mission that I came in with, which was I wanted to impact the media ecosystem in a positive way.

1:09:57And I wanted to learn to design a social media platform based on different incentives and have people actually use and like that thing. I kind of accomplished both goals. And so I was like, okay, I'll move on to my other goals now. I think the other part of this is you, I mean, I should ask you, like to what extent do you know what you, when it came to being an independent writer, perhaps more people would correctly identify how risky it actually is if they had more confidence in what it was they actually wanted to do? Yes, I think so. Like what level of fidelity, and you've written about this a little bit, but like what level of fidelity did you have over what this life could look like and what it would mean?

1:10:33You had, I think, some list of goals, which were like have fun and make money and a couple other things. But like, did you have a sense of like what success would look like in a lot of clarity? Yeah, I mean, so my first year, because again, my first year I treated as a trial year. Like 2025 for me was not, I am a full-time writer now. It was I am trying this out and I'm totally fine with going back to tech after like I was truly fine with going back into industry I didn't know if I was gonna stay with it. And so I told myself Am I having fun? Am I writing stuff? I'm proud of am I on track to financial sustainability?

1:11:06Even if I'm not making that much money now and those were my exit criteria for the first year to go into the second year Which is what made me comfortable with that now. I think I have broader goals now. I'm like, okay I'm actually a writer now. So I gotta get good at writing so when did you know how far into the the trial year maybe halfway through and was that mainly a product of the financial side of it was it mainly a product of the meaning and the fun was it mainly a product of like people like this um i think it was like i was having a lot of fun and i was pleasantly surprised by uh how much demand there was for the type of writing i wanted to do.

1:11:43Yeah. Yeah. Like, like one thing is it is clear now that there's an incredible amount of demand for Silicon Valley culture stories and AI stories. Um, I guess I wasn't paying that much attention at the time. Like it just so happened that those are the things that I am personally interested in, but like there is tons of demand for journalism from people in San Francisco writing about AI right now. And so I got really lucky where I actually ended up going to basically the fastest growing part of the media market and, uh, stuff, just growth and pitching and whatever was easier than I expected. Yeah.

1:12:16In some sense you were like, um, catering to where a ton of, no, I'm not saying it was totally deliberate, but you were catering to an area where there was a ton of demand. You weren't like, I want to go write creative poetry. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Um, which is probably more crowded and has less demand. Yeah. I think the risks would be super different if you wanted to go into poetry. Um, I think that a lot of people could still afford to take a year off to do poetry. And that might be really valuable for them to do, even if they continue to go back into a corporate job afterwards. And you just don't know, like, yeah, I mean, I didn't start a podcast for so long.

1:12:52Cause I'm like, it's just too late. And like, exactly. Like, um, why is patronage and maybe this has evolved to the point we were just talking about in writing more for big publications, but why is patronage the right business model and in such a good business model for someone like you? Interesting. I don't think of my business model as patronage. You think about it as gated content? Well, I have no idea, frankly. My income comes from a real mix of things. How much of your roughly, presumably a meaningful chunk of your income is sub-sac subscriptions? There's sub-stack subscriptions, there's philanthropic grants, and there's freelance writing and speaking.

1:13:33So one-third of that, I'm not sure. Sure, sure. It's roughly one-third, one-third. Arguably two of those buckets are patronage. That's true. I guess it is. I've never thought of it that way, but I guess you're right. Also, especially because some sub-stackers, it isn't really patronage. It's like a subscription. Yeah, but I don't pay well. You don't pay well. I pay well very early. Right. So you're basically relying on a lot of goodwill and then occasionally, or like the Atlantic and the New York Times. Yeah. Which paid not enough. Do you think your business model will primarily be patronage in two years?

1:14:05I think it would be nice to have things like speaking and such also be a bigger part of it and to do some more of the paywalling, mostly for diversification reasons. I think having the patronage situation I want to avoid, which is what I associate with the word patronage is having one primary patron. Because I think that then you are highly likely to get audience captured and you're also not really independent. And depending on their ideological goals, personal proclivities, whatever, it just feels like you're on a leash more. Whereas I think the thing that is good about diversifying income sources, even within philanthropic grants, like I take grants from very different organizations with very different political and ideological points of view, because I really don't want to be pigeonholed and I fear what it will do to my writing.

1:14:50So I am still, I think I would still be excited about continuing to get, say like half my income from patronage roughly or more than half. But I just, the thing I think more about is, is it sufficiently diversified that I both am perceived as independent and actually feel that I am independent and won't like make my funders mad or something. You and I already chatted about this a little bit, but you are someone who probably unlike most journalists could not only work in tech, but like could probably go get a job, one of the most coveted jobs in the world. Whether that be working directly at an AI lab or working in partnership with one of them.

1:15:32It seems like you have found a way to support yourself. Maybe this even actually goes back to the working on the Substack side, but like one of the big stories of Substack is not that only writers can support themselves, but the writers have built massive businesses. Yeah. To what extent do you think about the ability to build a really great business versus like, like presumably, and maybe you're just not money motivated or whatever, but like presumably someone like you could turn down the big money for a little while in the name of being independent and all these things. But like at some point, something's got to give probably.

1:16:18I think my sense is it's actually quite important that people on the far end of the power law of any discipline be able to do really, really well for themselves for that to become a long-term path. Like Emily Sundberg, I don't know how much she makes, but she's doing very well. Yeah, she's doing very well. That is very good for the world, independent of a handful of those machinations. it's cool that you have emergent ventures grant or something like that or it's cool that you have a fairly decent subscription like one of my senses is is that the reason that a lot of these big traditional media publications are struggling to retain talent and get the best talent is because they can make way more elsewhere like yes yeah it it's it's to put it another way like if if you You can make way more money doing podcasting, like as our client has, you probably are gonna, or have a greater impact there.

1:17:10I guess I just, I mean, there are things I, okay, I agree with like half of what you're saying, which is that a big part of the reason that SubSec was founded was that Chris Best, the CEO, thought it was really messed up that all of these incredible bloggers who had changed people's lives and who had huge readerships like Scott Alexander were doing it for free rather than being rich as they deserve to be. And working, doing a job on the side. And doing a job on the side. who's like a psychiatrist or like Chris thought it was crazy that if you work at the New York Times or any legacy newsroom, the person who's bringing in a hundred times more views is getting paid maybe two X the salary because of salary bands.

1:17:44And he just felt that the market didn't really value writers and creators accurately, and that you should be able to get rich by being a top one percentile writer, journalist or anything. And I completely agree with that. I think it's really important that Emily Sundberg and Scott Alexander and whoever can get rich doing what they do. It's amazing. At the same time, I really don't think I'm doing this to get rich. If I wanted to get rich, I would go work for an AI. I mean, it's like, right, this is my point. Like I took a very large pay cut. I mean, I think I'm going to make up the pay cut on accident or like, I think I will end up making up my like old tech salary pay cut.

1:18:20But I was perfectly happy to take a very large pay cut in order to do the thing I really wanted to do. And I have, yeah, I've turned down a lot of opportunities to make more money. Yeah. Maybe this wouldn't hold if I had kids for sure. This is my question is more about like the durability of it. Like the most important thing for any creative endeavor or really any endeavor at all, um, you think about this context of investing or whatever is being able to like stay in the game. Yeah. Okay. And so I guess that's my root question, which is like, it's cute that like you could like a thousand true fans, a really cute idea but like actually 100k isn't enough for like most americans to like live in a big city yeah um and so maybe i'm too much of a capitalist but it seems to me that we actually it's really really important that we find um great financial upside ways because otherwise everyone is going to go work in anthropic yes no i mean i completely agree with this like i worked at subsac because i thought it was really important that the best people get paid.

1:19:22And so my opinions about the ecosystem are like pretty separate about my opinions about myself, because I understand that like as a 26 year old with no children, I just have different needs and I'm like totally fine, like kind of broke for a little bit so that I can just have a lot of fun. But I want you doing great reporting in 10 years. I do too. I think that would be good, but I don't plan one. I don't plan that far in advance. Like one of the keys to happiness for me is I literally never plan more than a year in advance. Like I do not know what I will be doing in 10 years. It's very unclear to me.

1:19:52I would make a sub 50 % bet that I'm still a writer in 10 years, for example. By the way, and I think you will probably be very successful financially and otherwise, but. I hope so. But yeah, I mean, I think there's also a way in which like, because people overrate, like there's a lot of forms of capital in the world. I think that like attentional capital is super valuable. Social capital is super valuable. I think that a lot of people underrate the other forms of capital by focusing too much on financial capital and like I am building capital right now. I'm just building other forms of capital.

1:20:23You can watch a VC fund one day. I know I can cash these things in when I want to or if I need to. I know that if I wanted to write, put enterprise subscriptions or sorry, enterprise sponsorships on my subsec tomorrow, I know I could do it and I know I could make a lot of money doing it. I know I could, you know, do consult like comms consulting for some tech companies and really help them out. I know how I would make money, but in a way, I think it's harder to build attentional capital and cultural and social capital than it is to build financial capital. More importantly to me, I have more fun and I get to do the things I want more.

1:21:01And I feel this like immense luxury of having the freedom to like not do a nine to five and to get to live like what to me is a very fun life where I get to travel and write and talk to all these people. and if I need to start cashing some of that in, I know how I'll do it. And so I think the, even like the fact that I know how to turn it into financial security is enough financial security for now. I think that's all. The fear I think for people listening is probably, especially on the more journalist side of the house, is like the only way to cash out is like to fully compromise. And so I think that's the, the important thing is that we maintain a, maybe it actually just goes back to your original point of it.

1:21:45I mean, do you think that like an Emily Sundberg is compromised? You think that an acquired podcast is fully compromised? Like, I feel like the great thing about independent media and whether it's Substack or podcasts or whatever, is like, you're not, at least I don't feel that you're that compromised for being one of these types of businesses. I do not think that Emily nor acquired are compromised.

1:22:11I wonder about the different types of media and reporting though, which is like, to be like, it's actually quite a rare thing to have someone who could work at a big AI lab report on AI labs in some sense. Like maybe one of the reasons there aren't more journalists is because they all work there. I mean, I think about this a lot. I know a lot of people who worked in editorial at publications, who worked in policy writing, who have now gone and worked at one of, who have gone to work at one of the AI labs. would be the cynics view is that just like this is what capitalism will do over time yeah um but i think it goes back actually to your original point which is like being diversified is the is the resilience against this yeah when i talk to um like podcasters about how they think about their ads a lot of them do for example really focus on diversification so that if they accidentally offend one tech company that might be a sponsor or something like that like now they uh they obviously don't want to lose the sponsorship but they diversify so that it is possible to do so or you have news and business splits in newsrooms and even some large subsets I know will do the same thing where the person selling the ads is different from the person doing the writing.

1:23:17And when the person does the writing, they have no idea what ad is going to appear above or below it. And like, these are small things and you can make arguments that they're imperfect in a bunch of ways. But I think that there are, I think it's possible to be ethical and conscious about how your, um, how your sponsors, how your advertisers, how your patrons are going to to compromise your independence and not. It's obviously harder for someone who's doing like hardcore corporate accountability journalism, right? Like, I think that like, that kind of work is probably going to have to be a combination of like philanthropically plus subscriber supported because corporate sponsors are not going to go for a lot of that, which is both rational and sucks because I do think that accountability journalism really matters.

1:23:57And maybe it's possible that like, you know, I pissed somebody off so bad with my reporting this year that like, maybe right now I still think I could go work in tech again, but maybe it's not true. Maybe they're already so mad at me and they think I'm such a, you know, a rogue at this point that they don't even want me to do comms for some tech company. And I think I just have to take that risk. It's okay. I think also ultimately the negotiation between you and your readers is that you are going to be a good steward of this. Yeah. Like I think that is really the trust thing, right? Like is that like, yeah.

1:24:28Yeah. I mean, again, I might be making terrible financial decisions. Like I have no idea. I just don't plan in the future that much. I want to talk about good writing. You say the point of long form writing is to say something not reducible to a tweet. The TLDR of a Sontag essay could only be every word of it, wrote A.O. Scott.

1:24:51How do you do that? How do you get closer to writing where that statement could be true?

1:25:04part of it is style and craft. If you have a really distinct voice and a really unique style where you're not using cliches, you're using crazy metaphors and retelling anecdotes and whatever, then the style becomes part of the content and part of the substance. Like you would never read a ChatGPT summary of a Sam Criss essay, right? Like it would, it just, you lose everything about the Sam Criss essay when you lose the style. And I think that caring about voice and style and using fun words and writing fun sentences is a part of that process. I think also like I do see writing as a form of entertainment.

1:25:44Like it's not just eat your vegetables. Right. And, um, tweets are not entertainment. TLDRs are not entertainment. When I write about AI, I try to make it like somewhat interesting to people. Uh, most AI writing is like pretty dry and technical and a lot of it's for business reasons. So like I get it, But I think that I see part of my job as to entertain readers and to entertain the audience and to keep their attention captivated, even while I'm trying to share like serious information. and that's another way that you avoid people wanting to TLDR you or have their AI agent summarize you in a news roundup, right?

1:26:24It's like if the process of spending five or 10 or 20 minutes with your essay is intrinsically enjoyable, people are not going to want to TLDR it. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Maybe there's some payoff or some education at the end, but like that's almost the bonus versus the inversion, which is like, what's the point of the article? Like, why are you clickbaiting me or whatever. What about voice? Like, um, how, to what extent do you think you have consciously evolved or improved your voice? Or is it almost one of those things where it's actually, you have to try less in order to like have your voice come out?

1:26:59Um, yeah, definitely both. I mean, sometimes like when I feel really stuck or I feel like my writing's really dry, I'll like take out my like paper notebook and just like start writing in my paper notebook because somehow that feels like it is a less self-conscious form of writing and it's a more clear brain to page. It's like a more natural brain to page. And then my voice comes out more. I never thought about my voice until maybe earlier this year, late last year. This is actually one of the things that Claude helped with where sometimes people would tell me like, oh, I really like your writing voice.

1:27:29And like, that's great. It's good to hear. I actually have no idea what my writing voice is. I don't try. I just write how I want to write. And so I had Claude read all of my archive of subsects and try to describe my voice back to me. And I actually found that super helpful. What did it say? Like, I think one is like a blending of registers. I mean, I talked to Celine about this as well, but I think people's voice is an amalgamation of the experiences that they've had in the social context that they're in, right? And so as somebody who spends both a lot of time like in the AI industry, roughly a lot of time I'm on like the internet and in communities with a lot of like weird online slang, but also like, I like to read literature.

1:28:11I like to read critics. I do read serious journalism. Like the metaphors I choose and the words I use and the reference I make are going to be an amalgamation of all of those different influences. Right. And I think that's true of every single writer. And so one of one characteristic of my voice is that like, I do tend to like mix the, I don't know, like the rationalist jargon with the internet slang with the like, you know, literary critics point of view. Or I think another one is my voice is very first person. Like I do just naturally write as an eye. I say, I feel, I see, I'm not sure about this.

1:28:43Like even when I'm tackling politics and AI and whatever, I just find it natural to write in first person. So I usually do that. I tell, I like scene setting and I like anecdotes relative to writers who are more at an abstract level. I think for me, the, just like the way that I think is so often tied to very specific conversations I have or like quotes I remember or like things I see in the world. And so again, when I'm writing, I'm just trying to take the thing in my head and give it to somebody else and hope that it also hits. And so like, maybe it's not as rigorous as like reading a paper or something or looking at a poll to tell someone like an anecdote.

1:29:26Um, but I tell people the anecdotes. But it might be as true. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure if true is the right word, but it's, yeah. Um, to take the, uh, metaphor literally is it important? Do you try, do you care at all about writing how you speak?

1:29:46I don't try to, I try to write how I think more than how I speak. Yeah. Yeah. I have no idea. Do you think I sound like how I speak or sorry? Do you think I speak like how I write or is it different? The vibe is the same. Okay. But again, I don't know. It makes me feel like I'm not like, it's authentic, but like, again, yeah, it's, yeah, I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, I guess the real litmus test would be when you meet someone, when someone who's read you for a long time meets you in person. Yeah. Does it feel, I think I've asked actually a couple of people this question. They tend to think I am roughly the same.

1:30:20Um, like, I don't feel like I am somebody who does a lot of, uh, I mean, I guess in certain senses I code switched because I talked to a lot of people from very different communities But like I think I am roughly the same in all of the context And so I don't think people are very surprised. I like to context collapse I like to introduce my friends to each other I think part of like what one thing that some people don't like about say having a blog or being very open online is that They feel uncomfortable with the idea that people from different parts of their lives will like See this like same self that they present, right?

1:30:49Like if you write a personal essay, like your mom and your boss and like some stranger, they're all going to see that. And I think I'm like relatively and pretty consistent. So I've accepted that they will. Another version of this is like, are you as fun to hang out with as you are to read? Which I'm not sure that's the case for every writer. Oh, God. I mean, it's definitely not. I've yeah, I've definitely been to some conferences where most writers are just not very compelling speakers. And that's OK because they have other talents. Yeah. But yeah, most writers can't really, maybe not most, many writers can't really speak.

1:31:23You wrote, blogging is not only a search query, referencing Henrik's excellent post, but a kind of prompt for human wisdom. The world will respond with the seriousness that you put into it. Can you say more about that?

1:31:42um i think when i put a lot of effort into writing something people it's proof of work again and it means that people strangers will put a lot of effort into the response right and it's a way to like one thing that i think about a lot is like i feel really rich in information i love information I love knowledge. I love, I love facts. I love knowing stuff. Um, and I'm not very capital rich right now, but like, I kind of know a lot of stuff. I could talk to a lot of people. This is what Tyler is. He wants to be like an information trillionaire. Yes. Yes. No, totally. I completely understand that.

1:32:20And so one of my favorite things about writing is like, if I pour like my heart and soul into a piece and it's like really evident, like I remember one of my favorite things is, um, I wrote this like 7 ,000 word China essay last year. That's about my family and it was about travel and it was about technology and all of these things. And I spent a lot of time on this essay. You got a Kevin Kelly comment too, which was cool. Oh yeah, I was really happy about that. That made me very happy. And it was, my favorite thing about it was like getting all of these emails from people who had either lived in China or spent time in China at like various points throughout the last like 50 years who just like write me essays and email about like their own stories or their own experiences.

1:32:58Say growing up in Shenzhen and seeing, the phrase I remember is skyscrapers sprouting up like mushrooms, which I think is like incredibly beautiful, evocative phrase. I'm like, someone just wrote this in a freaking email to me, a stranger. And I think that's the thing that I feel really fortunate to get is if I spend, yeah, sure, a lot of time writing this piece, like I get rewarded many times over with other people's own sharing, memories, disclosures, whatever. And I just think that's like really, really special. One of the ways the internet can be the most special is that phenomenon specifically.

1:33:33almost inside of it is like, you're allowed to care this much. Yeah. Not quite exactly the same, but it's something to that. Like the internet is this place where you can find the people, the weirdos who care as much as you do. Yeah. And they really can be anywhere, right? Like it is like the original dream of the internet is still alive to me in that sense where I think that through writing, I am able to maintain a lot of friendships with people who live in other countries or other cities, especially if both of us are writers, you know? And often I've noticed that like, if I like someone's tweets, for example, it doesn't actually mean we're gonna get along in person.

1:34:06But when someone and I like each other's long form writing, we almost always hit it off. Like we really do hit it off. There's something that is deeper, that is like the connection is stronger. And so that to me is just really exciting. I don't know. Do you think it happens as much for podcasting?

1:34:24I think it, I probably get less wordy responses, which is probably telling um but it's certainly like a bat signal yeah um i have i mean i have friends who i've i certainly have friends who i've met through interviewing people um and i have friends who i've met because they like like the podcast yeah yeah um do you think that your podcasting self is like roughly who you are oh man we i mean you and i talked about this a little bit like there is an element of this that's performance i probably talked about this before but it's like I'm choreographed or excuse me, I'm conducting the orchestra with one hand and I'm playing in the orchestra with the other hand.

1:35:01Yeah. And there's a version of me that could do, could not have this in front of me and not do any prep and just would be maximally present and be less performance. And so that would be more like me in real life. And then there's a version of me that was just like perfectly scripted. And I'm trying to find the right balance between those two. I don't know. I'd have to ask, I'd have to ask people who. I think it's probably fairly similar. Yeah. You seem relatively the same as you did when we got coffee, for what it's worth. I'll take it. Yeah. I'll take it. You wrote somewhere that you carry around printouts of your favorite essays and put them in your laptop bag.

1:35:43Either printed out or otherwise, what are some of your favorite essays? The one that I always talk about and that I probably look at the most is Gideon Lewis Krauss' 15 ,000-word essay about Google Brain in 2016. I don't know it. It's called The Great AI Awakening. It was in New York Times Magazine. And I think it is the best piece of AI journalism that I've ever read. And like, it's everything that I want, aspire towards in writing, which is that, again, writing has so many components to it. There's like reporting, there's like pro style, there's like the ideas and whether the ideas themselves are good.

1:36:19And I think this magazine story is all of those things in that it's really funny. Like he writes about the different characters like these like AI researchers and engineers and ways that are just like turn them into these like delightful, like hilarious characters as we were writing a novel. The pro style is really wonderful. It's very deeply reported. Like he literally just hung out in the Google brain offices over and over and over and like talk to Jeff Dean and talk to like Kwakla and like just like spent a lot of time with the people really learning about both who they are and also that technical work they were doing.

1:36:51he can like summarize these very complex AI papers to a lay person in beautiful and yet also accurate ways. And then also it was just so prescient. The thing that I think is maybe most amazing to me is not just that it's a great work of, you know, nonfiction writing, which it is, like he's a very good prose stylist, but also that like, okay, this thing was in 2016. In 2016, D-Mind was doing like AlphaGo and like OpenAI was doing robot hands or something. Like no one had really cracked LLMs yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like in this 2016 piece, he's like, yeah, maybe he was writing a Google translate upgrading to the transform or to a more LLM based model.

1:37:27And he's like, yeah, maybe language is pathway to artificial general intelligence. And he like says all of these things that we now take for granted as being true about AI progress as a New York journalist in 2016, writing about Google translate upgrading their model for 50 years. And I just think that's like, it was so prescient. It was so brilliant. And it just really stands the test of time. There are very few pieces about AI that stand the test of time like that. That's a 10-year-old piece, and I still reread it. That's pretty amazing. Maybe zooming out, but on the same thread, you wrote somewhere that you wish or you want to be able to observe the world like Maggie Nelson.

1:38:07Are there other essayists or writers or journalists or observers who have been influential on you? I know somebody like, we talked about Sontag a little bit. Yeah. No, I mean, I love Sontag. I love Maggie Nelson in the sort of culture critic camp. Um, yeah, I think Gideon's excellent. Um, I think Dan Wong's work is very good. I think a lot of the people who I admire both have like a cultural lens to their work. Um, like a cultural, deeply humanistic lens. Like they're very interested in people specifically. Um, but they're also sharp. Um, and I, I like sharpness. Um, who are some of the other essays I love?

1:38:48I really like I do really like Anna Wiener's work Megan O 'Giblin who wrote God, Human, Animal, Machine that's another she's an essayist her first essay collection was about the Midwest and Christianity and her second one was about almost like the theology of how we think about machines and artificial beings because she has this like theology background so interesting it's super cool I like the Christianity essay collection as much as I like the AI ish collection Megan O Giblin She's really cool. I love her work. It's just like They're like nonlinear ways of thinking and again, it's like a mix of disciplines, right?

1:39:32Like you don't think that these disciplines should illuminate each other, but they do I love Peter Hessler's China books and China essays I mean, he sort of to me is one of the classic like guerrilla ethnographers where he's not trained in like ethnography or whatever He I think he was more trained as a journalist, but his books are super funny. They're very character based They're not just like let me cite a bunch of stats and charts and whatever It's like I'm gonna hang out with like a weaker tradesman in Beijing and like eat lamb skewers together And I'm gonna go road tripping around the Great Wall and then get caught by the police and like Sounds like a little Bernan-ish almost or something And like that style of like living in the world as the sort of credibility for your writing And again, it's such a human focus it's all about these very particular characters that he meets and the real relationships that he builds say with his students when he taught in Chengdu like that kind of writing is really influential to me what does sharpness mean?

1:40:25ooh

1:40:30um yeah that's it's a good question because sharpness and precision are two things I really value but I've never attempted to define them are they the same? No, but they're related. I think it has something to do with clarity of thought. I think it's like knowing what your point of view on a piece or a story or an issue is. You're not just doing summary. You're not making like 10 tangential arguments at the same time. Like there's an angle to things. There's like a thing you're trying to accomplish, whether it's a frame or a question or a conclusion. yeah I think being sharp has to do with your clarity of thought and how much you know what you're trying to do with a piece yeah it cuts very cleanly there's something really elegant about when somebody can make a point like that yeah yeah you told me uh or maybe we even talked about earlier like when you're like sort of like figuring out what you think is very different than when it's converted, like when it's in your head and when it converts into writing, like there's this like blob that needs to convert.

1:41:46Like, do you have any sense? Is that just about clarity and precision? Maybe what I'm asking about is like, are you, will you think about something and kind of come up with your conclusion and then convert it into words? Or are you actually thinking on the page? Does that delineation make sense? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think we have this, like a lot of people say writing is thinking. I believe this is true for many people. Writing definitely helps me think, but the primary work of thinking is to me separate from writing. Like maybe I'm doing some writings and like I'm taking notes or like scribbling or something, but they feel like separate parts of the process to me where like the active synthesis of me, like pouring over like a bunch of notes and interviews and papers and essays side by side and trying to figure out like, what do I actually think here?

1:42:38is a separate process from now that I know what I think, what I'm trying to accomplish, the frame I'm trying to introduce, how do I make that legible and entertaining to the reader? But when you're in the thinking process, are you just like sitting, like arranging puzzle pieces in your head? Is the thinking actually this mix of reading and listening and going on a lot? Yeah, it's all of these things. Like, again, it's like when I come back from China, I have like 150 bullet points in my notes app. What the fuck is going on in this notes app? I'm like rearranging them into like little blocks like trying to like, if they were sticky notes I guess I'd be doing it but I just like copy and paste around my notes up and I'm like trying to find clusters and themes that emerge.

1:43:16It's kind of writing, but it's not prose development. No, it's not prose necessarily. I also will call people, I'll talk to Claude. Sometimes like with the AI and labor piece I spent a lot of time talking to friends of mine who I just thought were like really smart thinkers about AI and the economy where I was just like, okay, like this is a really complicated issue. It's very controversial. Economists haven't decided what they think is going to go on in the labor market. And I need to figure out what do I actually think is going to happen? And then what do I want to say in my piece? And I would just like debate kind of on the phone or think out loud and get pushback from friends who I thought were smarter than me.

1:43:49And through the process of conversation, we would arrive at an outline and then I would stare at it again, push back here and there. But like, it's really messy. It's not a clean process. You also, maybe it's a similar note. You wrote at some point in every project, it stops living in the Google doc and starts living in your mind. Everything else you see and hear gets filtered through this frame of the essay. Is that just a by-product or is that actually like a part, is getting to that point a part of your writing process? Like, does it change once you've gotten to the point where now like you're seeing the world?

1:44:27It's a good question. I don't think it's intentional, but I actually think it is part of the writing process now that you bring it up. Like I think that the piece gets a lot better at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like there's additional stuff that can happen only then. Right, because like that's when I start to bring in things that when I start to make non-obvious connections. Yes. Because when you're just doing research, it's like very scoped, right? Like it's like, here's my reading list. I'm in my sandbox. I'm in my sandbox. I'm going to do these 10 interviews. And like you're thinking within the sandbox.

1:44:53But once I'm like immersed enough in a piece, every conversation, like it's kind of annoying to my friends probably, but like I'm always bringing up what I'm thinking. And like, I don't care if the person's an expert. I just want to know how they react to it. Totally. Or like everything I see in the world, like kind of connects to the piece, like the companion piece to my permanent underclassing that I did on my sub stack. I was in China. I was finishing the permanent underclass piece. I was in China to learn about like open source AI or something. Like the point was not for me to think about the labor market, but I couldn't stop looking around and noticing how many fake jobs people were working in China.

1:45:21Like you have street sweepers in every park who are literally sweeping clean streets. And you have people who are checking your bags in the subways and they're not actually checking. We all know that they're not actually checking. There's these security guards monitoring like extremely safe areas every 200 meters in broad daylight. And it's very clear or it only became clear to me after I was in this mode and I was writing this piece and I couldn't stop thinking about the labor market. That was like, oh, these are jobs programs. Like I've been to China a lot of times before. And it never clicked that they were government jobs programs that because China has high levels of unemployment, the government is very motivated by social stability.

1:45:57And they are willing to have some inefficiencies in their bureaucratic spending to give people something to do because the Chinese government believes that like giving people work is like just a inherent good in and of itself. But like I literally would not have noticed that in my general environment had I not been in the mode of my New York Times piece where everything was getting filtered through it. And then the park that I've gone on, gone in a run through, like, you know, dozens of times at this point, I'm like, yeah, why is that guy sweeping a clean street? Like, I never thought about it before.

1:46:26And so, like, I do think you just start to make all of these, like, crazy connections. And that's one of the most satisfying parts for me in writing. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have the same thing after interviews. I just start, like, the rest, the next week, I'm just, like, filtering back. I'm almost, like, processing it post-fact. Yeah. Like, fully digesting it. um henrik carlson talks about this when he's working on a piece he's like it's like a room that i have a key to and when i publish the piece i'm like throwing away the key so sometimes he won't publish it because he wants to keep like that headspace yeah a little while that's cool i like that i do feel a little bit like that too because when i publish i don't return as much to it anymore or at the very least it's more now you're ready to go like talk about it and spread It's formed now.

1:47:11And so I kind of know what my thesis is. I'm not in the exploratory mode. I mean, one of the things they do in reporting in interviews, and this also is some of the capital J journalism stuff again, but a lot of journalists, some journalists, I shouldn't generalize, some journalists when they're asking people for interviews, they're just really trying to get one quote out of them. They're going to a person because they think that this person, based on the organization they work for, is going to say this one sentence and I need to plug that sentence into my piece. They just want you to be like, like, oh yeah, like Elizabeth Ward's policy is good or bad.

1:47:41And like, you can predict what they're going to say even before you do the interview. For me, the thing that I find most fun about reporting is the process of discovery. And so I'll go into, especially the first set of interviews I do, like the first like 15 calls or whatever, I'll tell the person, like, I don't know what I think about AI in the labor market yet. Like, I'm still trying to figure out this issue. So just so you know, I'm not just trying to get a single quote out of you. I'm trying to work through the issue and can we just talk because I'm in this learning mode and I'm in this discovery mode.

1:48:09And I really like being in discovery mode. It's much more fun. And I think it also makes them trust me more, which is not I will never reach a conclusion. Like they know I'm going to have an opinion eventually, but like it is malleable for quite a long time. And I like feeling like the ideas are malleable. I think you wrote somewhere that you like hate all your old writing or something, or you just think it's all bad or whatever. But I'm curious how you think specifically you've gotten better. Hmm.

1:48:44One thing that I noticed between when I wrote at the beginning of last year and when I write now on Substack is that I hedge much less. And when I - You're sharper, probably. Yeah, I think I'm sharper. When I read like some of the pieces I thought were like pretty good pieces at the time, like I did this one on what AGI means and trying to disambiguate the term AGI. I sound so nervous and insecure and self-conscious. in the piece. Like every other sentence, I'm apologizing for like not knowing anything about AI. And it's because at the time, I really felt this way, right? Like it's like, it was an accurate representation of how I was thinking.

1:49:20And I don't know if I regret it because it was warranted humility as in I hadn't spent that much time in these debates in these worlds yet. And so I did feel like I was in the process of learning, but I think it was a less effective piece of writing because I was hedging so much, right? And I also had this complex when I was writing last year where I evaluated all my own work by what my most expert friend would think about it. So when I wrote about AI, I thought about the people I knew who had been working in AI the longest. And when I wrote about China, I thought about the China scholars I knew and the professors I knew.

1:49:52And when you're in this mode, you think all your writing's really bad. And it's like really, yeah, it's not good for the psyche, I think. Well, the challenge is like on some hand, on one hand, that probably does make your writing better. It does. Like you aim for the stars or whatever. On the other hand, it can't be the litmus through which you judge the final product. It's not for them Yeah, it's not for them That's the thing that I think it took me until late last year to realize was like I'm writing for an audience that is not they're smart I write for smart people, but I don't write for like the world's expert on this issue And like I'm just trying to move their understanding forward, right?

1:50:26And but like you know, who knows you might surprise yourself like you actually might end up influencing the experts to in an you know, in an unexpected way. Yeah, probably, sometimes I do, right? Like, it's like, I actually do feel like the people - Gideon Krauss, maybe, to the point, like he actually maybe called it, the language model point. Oh, yeah, I mean, no, I mean, I think sometimes the outsiders do see things more clearly than the, like, known experts in the field. But, yeah, I think I read a lot of the self-consciousness and hedging and insecurity in my past writing. And I have a little bit less of that now.

1:50:59Which is not to say that, like, I think I'm an expert, but I'm just, I realized that the best end product is not constantly apologizing for its own existence. Yes. You said you wouldn't write if you couldn't publish. Oh yeah. And yet you also have this like amazing piece somewhere where you're talking about Hanya Yanagihara. I'm sure I'm butchering that. And this idea of the audience of one and this kind of more autotelic thing, non-instrumentalism. How do you square those two things? And I'm not, are you sure you wouldn't write if you couldn't publish? I'm not sure I believe you. Um, I believe me because I'm not a journaler.

1:51:42I don't journal. No. Maybe I journal once every two to three months. So hold on. Okay. Like I don't write when I'm not publishing. So when you were at Substack, I mean, one, you were sometime publishing on Substack. Yeah. I mean, we talked about like you've been writing since you were a kid. Yeah. You basically just only have been writing if you could share it. Yeah, basically. I mean, like, I wouldn't say I've shared, like, sometimes I try to write something because I think I'm going to share it, but then it's crappy and I don't. But everything has that intention of having an audience. And to be clear, sometimes I write emails, right?

1:52:11Like, I like writing emails to my friends and my mentors. And to me, that counts as publishing because someone's going to read it. I like, when I worked at Subsec, we had an internal Subsec. And a lot of the way that, because I joined as an intern with no college degree and, like, I just, like, was very junior in the Subsec hierarchy. and a lot of the way that I ended up like leading the core product team and like moving up in the organization was that I wrote a lot on our internal subsec and I just like write my product takes and my strategy takes and enough people liked them and read them that they eventually involved me in better conversations and gave me more responsibility and things like that.

1:52:43But like for me, writing is a form of politics. It's a way to change the world. It's a way to meet people. It's communication. It's a way to shift discourse. It's communication, right? Because again, my thinking process is separate. I don't think by writing. I think in some other weird blobby way that involves conversations and notes and reading. This is interesting. And because writing for me is completely a communicative act, I'm trying to entertain people. I'm trying to share an idea. I'm trying to like make a dent in the discourse, right? And so like, because of that, I don't like, if I was just trying to think, I wouldn't be writing.

1:53:15Well, maybe it's not an audience one, but there was this, I think it was, I don't think it was when you left Subtact. Maybe you were still there. You said, I think working a lot has made me a worse writer. my prose is tight and the excess trim information efficiency is paramount I write like the$12 dust salad the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200 calorie brick but good writing like a good meal needs fat it should indulge readers it's meant to be chewed and enjoyed affording a generous escape from the prosaic and the mundane and then you go on to say you're talking about sort of like increasingly feeling like so much of your life is instrumental you say as I've gotten older I've increasingly viewed art is enjoyable, but auxiliary secondary to the real work of politics in high school, I traded creative writing for debate, so on and so on.

1:54:02But I have begun to come around on this art, or at least good art is defined by its non instrument in non instrumentality. Art is not useless, but it is use agnostic. And that's what makes it so useful after all.

1:54:18You write like most of your writing is pretty instrumental. Yeah. That's not to say it's not ever artistic or creative. I think it is so many of those things. Do you have an ambition to do more artistic things?

1:54:37I do. I don't know that I'd be good at it. That's okay. I really admire, I admire Johania Yanagihara so much because when you read that New Yorker profile of her that I think that piece refers to. She doesn't think about the audience. She doesn't care if people like her. She doesn't care what, when she drops the boulder into the lake, she doesn't look to see it. And it does because her work is very good and she cares about the craft purely internally. But I just don't know that I'm built like that. I think it's good because audience capture does pose a lot of risks, right? and if you don't care about the craft and the rigor for its own sake you're not going to produce work that matters anyway but I think I see myself more as a consumer than a producer of art for now like art is something that I consume and appreciate I don't actually see my writing as art my writing is mostly communication I care about the style I care about it it's very creative creative um i try to be i try like i try to have fun with it like you know i not every piece is i'm not writing policy memos right um but it's i it's always for an audience i think that's the thing is like even when i'm trying to be creative it's because i'm trying to entertain right maybe on the last note another question that um that celine brought up that i loved which is what it what does it mean to do beautiful or expressive non-fiction writing he said somewhere else um you that you don't write fiction because there's no grander game than what is actually going on which is awesome i'm sure many would disagree but oh yeah on that last note of like maybe just being entertaining but yeah like it isn't lifeless it is i don't know if i would use the word beautiful and across all the context but some of it like that china post was amazing and so lively and certainly expressive.

1:56:43Yeah. I'm reminded of like our conversation about AI writing and AI art. And like at some point the AIs will get good enough that they'll make movies and write essays that are better and more enjoyable for the reader than a lot of our work. Right. Like I'm I'm ready for my AlphaGo moment on the writing. It's going to happen. But to me, the point of writing is to communicate the life behind the work. And the fact that the person who has generated the text is like a real living being who has desires and fears and motives and is a subjective person with weird biases and family baggage and trauma and whatever else, right?

1:57:24Like - I've talked with you about this with Lee Cito. He's like Lee Cito, super into K-pop. Yes, I thought that was amazing. That's what makes him a human. Oh, exactly. Exactly. And like, I think that when we, like, I always think about like, when people like listen to a pop song, sometimes they're just listening because they want to listen. But when someone's like a real loyalist to like a particular pop star, they usually have this like grand narrative about their life and the dramas in it. And it's like, oh, she wrote this album because she's going through this breakup and like whatever. And like, again, when you, when you marvel at like Michael Phelps swimming or like Alyssa Liu and like her ice skating performance, it's not just the fact that she's a good skater.

1:57:59Of course, she's a good skater. We definitely appreciate that. But it's like the life behind the work. We're compelled by Alyssa Liu because we hear about her dad. We hear about her quitting. We hear about her coming back and learning to love it for herself. And like when I see it on her face, you see it on her face. Looking down at her. It's the expressiveness, right? Like it's not just a technically perfect performance. It is a technically perfect performance and the like liveliness shines through. Right. And like unitary robot Alyssa Liu would just never be as compelling. And so I think nonfiction writing is quite similar where like I am trying to.

1:58:28Sure, I'm trying to transmit ideas, but I'm also trying to evoke that there is a life behind the work. There's a very particular point of view with a set of flesh and blood experiences that I have that don't have to be representative, don't have to be objective, but that I'm hoping that people can connect with. And that also for me, like it feels more authentic. It feels more real. It's more enjoyable. Perhaps you kind of just answered the question, but which of your work, either what specifically or what aspects of it are you most proud of? I am really proud of the China piece. I think it's probably my favorite thing I've written.

1:59:04I think it felt structurally ambitious to try to weave together some of the family history stuff with a travelogue to China with stuff about the Chinese tech ecosystem and Wang Huning and more abstract political stuff. And so I was really personally, like, I remember the moment where I like figured out the structure and that was super satisfying. Cause like initially when I wrote it, it was just like a day by day, like type thing of observations, which is fine and would have been okay. But it wasn't until I unlocked both like the Wong Hooning America against America frame, plus this like realization of like, Oh, like different migrations from different members of my family.

1:59:52And so much of this, so much of the AI story is a talent story. It's about why individual people decide to like seek out opportunity for themselves that the piece felt like it clicked. And then it was also just important because it was like emotional. Like my grandmother had just passed and I was like in China to in part, because I wanted to learn more about her life. And I was going through like hundreds of photographs with my mom and my grandfather from like her early life in Indonesia to like when she moved to Fujian by herself, like with like leaving behind her parents and eight siblings, like to her college days.

2:00:25And it was just like, I think that personal motive, I wanted to write something that would honor the story. And so I think that was another big part of it. I think you did. I have like a speed round of miscellanea. We can race through a bunch of random things. A few things on China, actually quickly. First of all, it's the same reason I love San Francisco For all its thorns, China is a place where things actually happen. Chinese engineers also seem more practical than their American counterparts. They're here to build tech and make money. Risk management is for bureaucrats. Policy is only relevant insofar as it helps or hurts your work.

2:01:00This is something I think Westerners often get wrong. If you live in a single-party state, you are on average less ideological yourself. The politics have already been decided. No point wasting extra cycles coming up with something new. So I think that there's like, you're pointing at something like, that I think is really underrated there. And maybe people like, it made me think about people always wondering in the US, like what must they be thinking about? It's almost like it's like, you're brought down like one level of the decision tree. Can you say more about like, is there like almost a sort of freedom that the average Chinese person gets from not having to think about this stuff?

2:01:42or Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because like it's such a contrast to my own experience. Like I spent a lot of time thinking about like political philosophy and like how I want the world to be organized. And recently I've been thinking a lot about the AI backlash. And so during my last trip to China, I was asking a lot of people in China, both like AI engineers and my family members and random people like, is there an AI backlash in China? Do people think about it? And it's similar where people would say like, like almost the idea of an AI backlash is kind of silly. because AI and its diffusion is taken as a given, especially because I think the Chinese government has decided that AI is part of their strategy for national advancement.

2:02:26And so there's not even a culture of resistance or even the idea that one might oppose a new technology because it is taken as a given. In the same way that like, you don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what alternative political systems might emerge if you've grown up in a society where there is only one. So those two things are almost mirrored. Yeah. And of course, I'm being generalizing. Of course, there are dissidents in China. There are people who do critique AI. There are people who are doing underground kind of more activists. Americans, we're going to debate everything. We have an opinion on everything.

2:03:02Yes. And the majority of Chinese people just don't spend that much time thinking about it. Wow. Because there is a precedent where if you try to organize a protest, you are going to get shut down immediately. you were gonna get thrown in jail. Like why even try, right? Like what is the point of resisting? And like, there's a way that you can look at this as being very bleak. And in many ways I do think that sucks. Like I love pluralism. I think free speech is really important. I could never live in China because I value free speech and pluralism so highly. But I also don't think it's, there's still a lot of degrees of freedom that you have at a lower level outside of the big questions of like, how is our society organized?

2:03:43And can you stop AI? Such as, how will I use AI? I think a lot of Chinese people spend more time thinking about how AI can benefit them because they have accepted that this is a given in their lives. And then it's a question of, okay, do I want an elder care robot? Am I going to get this job? What is the actual role that this thing is going to play in my life? There's a world where some of these things, if they really are deterministic, they might be better prepared to think about the details of them. Yeah, I think that the median urban Chinese person is probably maybe doing a better job thinking about how AI can help them than the median urban American.

2:04:17Right. Another one, there's a saying that goes something like, after one week in China, you feel like you could write a book. After one year, you think you could write an article. After 10 years, you realize you know nothing. I think you express in that piece that you're sort of in the middle of that spectrum. Yeah. But what's inside of that? Is it the history? Is it the fact that China is in many ways like an ancient culture? Is it the vastness? Is it the size?

2:04:44Yeah, I think all of those things. I mean, it's like the United States, right? Like I grew up in America. Do I even understand America? I don't think so, right? Like I spent all my time, I grew up in Seattle. I live in San Francisco. I've lived in New York before and I've spent a little bit of time in New York and DC now. These are extremely self-selecting pieces of what America is, right? And so like, I don't feel very capable of speaking for, I barely feel capable of speaking for Americans when I've never lived outside of these like coastal hubs to attempt to speak for China when I go to Shanghai like once a year or something and I've been to a few other cities once or twice just feels impossible.

2:05:21And in particular, there's also language barriers. There's, yeah, there's all of these things. I think it's just like, I want to afford China as a country and as a society, the same level of respect for complexity that I afford the United States, which is something I think a lot of observers don't do. To be fair, I don't know if most Americans afford the United States that complexity either. You've compared China and San Francisco, like what, at its most virtuous, what do you admire about San Francisco or Silicon Valley? I think it is the agency. um i think people think it's cringe now but i i am such an agency believer like i studied sociology i was very interested in like social justice stuff as a teenager and as a young adult um i was like worked at non-profits and did like college activism and stuff like very like lefty circles and there's just this pervasive mood in a lot of these environments that you're you're screwed.

2:06:22Everybody's screwed. No matter how hard you fight, like capitalism and white supremacy and all these like crazy superstructures are going to win in the end and they're going to ruin your life. Plus everyone's like operating the scarcity mindset and trying to cancel each other all the time. I remember even, I mean, media is a bit like this too. Like when I talked to journalists when I was under God and I was like, should I become a journalist? So many of them were like, nope, it's over. Journalism's over. Like we're all dying. We're all getting laid off. There's no future. and the thing that I really loved about the tech industry in Silicon Valley is that there's always a sense and insistence on there being a future there's a delusional insistence on your ability as a random individual with no qualifications to shape that future and there's a celebration of the people who do that and I just thought that was amazing it actually in many ways reminded me more of reading these books as a kid about civil rights leaders, reading about MLK Jr.

2:07:12or Yuri Kochiyama or whoever, where you do have to stand in the face of a superstructure that is greater and more powerful and wealthier than yourself. And rather than sort of retreating into fatalism, you say like, screw it. Like I'm an idealist. We're going to make some shit happen anyway. And in many ways, I think that Silicon Valley at its best embodies that kind of delusional idealism. And I think that you, sometimes it's delusional, but you don't even get any of the good unless you actually believe that it's possible, right? Right. Like that's what saved me in a way from like the life of being like an extremely depressed and cynical leftist was meeting a bunch of people in Silicon Valley.

2:07:51I mean, in 2021, one of the formative experiences in my life was I lived in a group house for two months in Kinkoen with a bunch of Teal fellows. And they were the ones who convinced me that I should do writing and start a magazine and that I could be a journalist. like, again, I had called all these journalists who were real journalists and they were like, nope, you're screwed, it's doomed, this industry's over. And it was like these Teal Fellow startup dropout kids who were like, wait, like, why can't you run the New York Times? By the way, probably don't care about journalism. They don't even care.

2:08:20They just believed in me believing in myself. And like, they would argue with me. Like, I'd be like, nobody wants to fund journalism. And they would literally just sit on the couch and argue with me for hours. And then they would introduce me to my first funders for my old print magazine. I mean, like that sense of belief in different futures being possible is a thing that I love more than anything else. And so, like, I don't know if I'm an optimist or pessimist about the tech industry. It's done a lot of good. There are things I don't love about it. But, like, I really wish that other parts of other industries, other sectors, other people, other communities had the same sense of belief.

2:08:59And, yeah, like it's almost this deterministic sense. Like if I set out the future, I know I can get there. Right. And I think that's guided me quite a bit, too. It's just like being able to set a goal. Like I want to design a social media platform from scratch and make everyone use it. And there you can't guarantee it, but you're sure as hell not going to do it if you don't think that you can. Beautiful. What do you think this place is most under calibrated on or could use a dose of?

2:09:32I think it is insularity and it's not being interested, not respecting and not being interested in the rest of the world. You have such a strong belief that we can reinvent everything from scratch. We can first principles it, that we are smarter and we can figure out how to do government better. We can figure out how to do government better. It's the opposite side of the good coin. It's the exact same thing. I mean, like, I think agency is important, but I don't think agency and insularity have to go hand in hand. Like agency doesn't mean that you're okay if everyone else hates you or that you think you don't need to collaborate, right?

2:10:09And the attitudes that bother me in Silicon Valley often come from this anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic instinct where you don't think you have stuff to learn. You don't have to do the same thing as everyone else, but are you not even curious? Or like the vice signaling stuff. Like I think it is a virtue in and of itself to try to make people like you. Like it is a virtue to be pleasant. It is a virtue to try to communicate what you're trying to do to others and to set hope that they will understand and support what you're doing. At the point where Silicon Valley search companies are no longer even interested in making that case to the public, they're basically saying like, screw you, I don't care what you think.

2:10:49It's not important to have democratic buy-in for my project. Yeah. And that's what really bothers me. We talked around it a little bit, but one of the things you and I spoke about in the past is you made this point and you made this point in writing too that there's a view that like maybe technology can be, or excuse me, AI can be tools that empower us. And you, I think rightly make the point that the same tool that empowers the senior designer is gonna automate the junior designer. And one thing that you said to me really stuck, which was just like, the point is to one shot everything.

2:11:25How do you hold that view and feel that inevitability. You've made the point about you're going to get alpha goad. And because that view is sort of driving all these people to lose their minds over the rat race of the Chinese involution, all this stuff of just like, I have two years before it, nothing matters. Right, right. How are you sitting with that? I think it's really good that the world is this complex. I think we should all feel really fortunate that it is super hard to one shot all the jobs and that we are really far away from it. Um, it's like, there are all these lessons in management or in organizational sociology.

2:12:05Like the org chart is not the org chart. Like the world is extremely illogical or the real world is edge, all edge cases all the time. Not that many things are software problems. Not that many things are software problems. Yes. There's standard operating procedure. How often is that standard operating procedure followed? Even if it's 80 % of the time, right? That 20 % is a lot of freaking edge cases. and you know how many times do you do your like you know podcast setup and some tiny thing goes wrong and you got to adjust because the lighting's different or like something broke and it's just like again the real world is all edge cases all the time and so it's really hard to automate actually and it's really hard to make everything legible and you can collect a lot of data and despite all the internet data being like sucked up into these systems there's still so much tacit knowledge.

2:12:51There's so much that's never been written down. There's so much that is like literally in people's hands. That's just a vibe. That's like, you cannot understand unless you're like swimming in it and you're doing it. And so on one hand, I think it is explicitly the mission of these companies to one shot everything, to be able to do your job and my job in a single go. And I think that humans are just like a lot more general and flexible and complex and the organizations we build even more general and flexible and complex than we give them credit for, which is going to slow down the automation by quite a lot and give us time to adapt and to do new things.

2:13:29And, you know, I am not, I am somebody who I'm like, if I get a UBI check someday and I don't have a job, I feel like I'm going to have something to do. I think if you do that to people without them being ready for it, people are not going to spend their time well, People, I don't know what's going to happen then. But like really what matters with automation is the pace at which it occurs and how much time we have to both adapt with our jobs, but also adapt mentally and psychologically to the world we're living in. Yeah. You have this line in that, in the main permanent underclass piece, I think I will keep quoting Carl Benedict Frey.

2:14:05Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime. you're getting feedback from the times piece, an example. If anyone should have a sense of across DC and San Francisco, like, do we have a chance of like smoothing this curve? Yeah, I think we have a chance. I think. Or what's it going to take? Ooh. I need all the solutions, all the answers right now. Yeah, a lot of people working on this one. Yeah. Part of the reason I wrote the piece is because even while economists disagree very strongly about the long term, some people think there'll be more jobs than ever.

2:14:47Other people think that there's going to be a permanent underclass. There's actually quite a bit of agreement across the labs that this transition period is going to be pretty tough, right? Like even in Sam Altman's like more optimistic tweeting, he's like, we're going to, we're going to augment people. We're not going to replace them. Someday people will be more fulfilled than ever. The A16Z posts about the same thing. They all have a line that says there's going to be a painful transition. Every single one of these optimist posts talk about the transition will be hard. The change will be hard.

2:15:13And yeah, I mean, the reason I keep quoting that Frey line is I really want us to spend more time thinking collectively about how we will make that transition better. I think to the China shock and to deindustrialization where maybe like a few million factory workers lost their jobs over during the early 21st century in the US, way more jobs are created somewhere else. But the fact that those factory workers lost their jobs and never got a good job again, created the populist backlash that like very arguably led to the deaths of despair and led to Donald Trump, right? And like very small, for those people, that is their entire lives.

2:15:47They might've spent decades developing a set of skills, like going into debt to get educated, moving to a location to do one thing. And if we end up one-shotting that job, it sucks. It's not their fault. And like, what are you going to do with it? Right? And so I'm really interested in what the policy solutions are going to be. People talk about expanding unemployment insurance to give people more time to figure out the next thing. UI is six months in California, maybe in a world where you have to reskill to something else entirely. You need a couple of years. People talk about subsidies for junior employees.

2:16:21Like right now, there's not a lot of incentive to even train a junior person. And so through subsidies and adjustments to the tax system, you can actually give tax benefits to companies that hire young people. And that might make it easier for them to train the young person into something and to buy time in a way. I think in the long run, if we do start to see more automation, maybe we want to do things like give everyone a shorter work week instead of having some people be employed and some people not. Maybe it's better if everyone just works a little less. I don't know. I'm not going to stop the people around here working less.

2:16:57The people with mythos are not going to be working Oh, no. I mean, that's one of the funniest things is they're all like, oh, I can't wait for the post-AGI future. We're all just like doing leisure. I'm like, bro, you work a hundred hour. Yes. Yeah. I don't believe you. I don't believe you. But anyway, I'm not a policy wonk, but like, I think that there could be a lot more attention to it's going to be really hard over the next 10 to 20 years. A lot of that's a lot of people's lives. And we really need to focus on that. Yeah. One of my favorite ideas you have is, is the enjoying the sweet, sweet relational goods.

2:17:28Can you talk a little bit more about that world that you imagine of one-on-one tutors for students? Like what? Yeah. I mean, so when people force me to do the thing where they're like, you know, outline a good world. Yeah. Yeah. And I talked about this as Jack Clark. I've talked about this with some other folks like there. The idea of the relational sector, relational goods, which, you know, has existed for a while. But Alex, I'm a C-Economist, has been writing a lot about it recently. He says that there is some class of goods and services that we prefer a human do, even if a machine could do it equally well.

2:18:03Let's say teachers or something, right? Like, or like nannies. Let's say that a robot or a robot teacher with an LLM in its brain could equally provide curriculum, great homework, like tell you good job, whatever. We might still, for like various human reasons, prefer that a human is on the other side providing that service. And it's, people debate about how large the relational economy is and how many jobs there really are, or we actually care if a human did it. Like how many jobs are there for artisan bowl makers versus for Ikea machine generated bowl makers? Like, I don't know. But like, I do think that there's a set of jobs in the care economy, in one-on-one relationships, coaching, like facilitation, teaching, et cetera, where a lot of people, the majority of people will want another human to be in that role.

2:18:54And what Jack said was like, you know, a lot of more people would be teachers if teaching paid more. I think this is true. I know lots of people who would love to be teachers if it paid more. Or if you didn't have to. One of my best friends teaches ninth graders and he has a class of 45 kids. Literally. It's crazy. It's insanity. It's insane, right? And so like one thing I think about is like, okay, let's assume there are way less like management consultants and investment bankers and software engineers because we don't care if those jobs are done by people. But we really care that teaching is done by people.

2:19:21Maybe we can decrease the classroom sizes and we can give everyone like an Oxford tutor, right? Where you have a one-on-one relationship. you get to spend time with one person who is smarter than you in that field. They actually get to know you as a human. They can tune the curriculum. You can build a relationship human to human separate from your teaching relationship. And that probably makes you like do the reading better and like learn more. And like a society where we use like the windfalls from AI and we, you know, find a way to tax and redistribute it, maybe in part towards doing things like funding like 10 times as many public school teachers as we have today and paying them all twice as much.

2:19:53That seems like a pretty amazing world to me. I think there are a lot of people, frankly, who would be happy to live in that world. Probably a lot of things I'm missing on like the like policy side, but it makes sense to me that like, we know that there are nurses, teachers, whatever, who are so overworked therapists. And if we could pay them all, train them all, do one-to-one matches, it seems like it would be a better world. You've said everyone deserves to be bet on. Who has bet on you? I think one of the best things about being, about going into an independent writing career is realizing how much mentorship I'd receive, which I could not have predicted, but ended up being true.

2:20:34Maybe it's because writing is fairly precarious and there are not a lot of people who take this kind of risk that older and more senior writers are really, really eager to help young people figure it out. But I felt really fortunate with a number of journalists, writers, et cetera, who have offered advice, introductions, mentorship. I mean, I, my apprenticeship for real doing capital J journalism was that I worked with Kevin Roos on his big AI book for about eight months of last year, two days a week. And he just like brought me, like we interviewed Demis Hassabis together. Like we would like go to the open AI office and like do the tag team, the interviews.

2:21:13And it's, it was just like amazing. Cause you get all of the tacit knowledge of someone who is at the top of their game. Who's done this a million times. I actually get to participate, get to see the conversation happen, get to ask the questions sometimes get to be in the room. And like, I feel like there's no better way to learn the craft of journalism than just spending many, many hours with someone who's really good at it. And the fact that he decided to, I mean, you know, obviously I was doing work too, so it's a mutually beneficial arrangement, but I feel really fortunate that a lot of journalists have basically decided it's been worthwhile to teach me the ropes.

2:21:48I mean, Gideon Lewis-Krauss has given me a lot of amazing advice on especially approaching long form work, bigger pieces. He's read drafts of things where I'm like, Oh, I'm really scared that this company is going to be mad at me. Like, do you think they're going to yell at me? And he'll like, talk to me about that. Um, Dan Wong has been amazing, uh, uh, you know, talking me through the ropes of, I mean, Dan is the number one person in my life telling me to work harder and to grind harder, which I actually really appreciate because most people in my life are like, Jasmine, take a break. And Dan's like, no, never let up, hang out less.

2:22:22But I don't know. It's just like, I felt really fortunate to have a lot of other writers decide at basically like no very little benefit to themselves. So like take me under their wing and share what they know. Why is the Peter and Valentine Locke and Demosthenes subplot of Ender's Game meaningful to you? oh man I mean it's quite obvious so I read Ender's Game like every year from ages 10 to 20 like once over I haven't read it in a while I really should and the main plot is about you know this like video game genius right Ender and he has these two siblings Peter and Valentine who while he's doing his main stuff like accidentally committing alien genocide they are posing as bloggers on an internet forum like in the 80s where there isn't really an internet to write essays that are so good that they like solve world peace.

2:23:16And I was just like, I, you know, when I was a preteen, I too was blogging anonymously on the internet because I didn't want everyone to know that I was 12, right? And so like the idea that like, oh shoot, like if you, like I believed in this idea meritocracy, I believe in this marketplace of ideas and like the original vision of the internet that nobody knows you're a 12 year old. And if your ideas are good enough, which mine were not at age 12, like you could really change the world for the better. And so, I don't know. I just like love that arc. I thought about it all the time. I think it's, yeah, it just comes back to that.

2:23:52What makes a good party? I think that, um, in a good party, most people should know at least three other people, but not the majority of people in the room. And you want like the social clusters, to overlap, but to not be isolated. Like I have like a, I have a network graph in my mind. I can't really like paint a picture, but like, I feel like the sociology part of my brain has a network map. And it's like, you want enough overlaps between all of the different social clusters because this will get different groups of people who don't know each other to talk to each other. Casket, yeah. Yeah, but you don't get people who are so isolated that they never leave their current friend group, right?

2:24:33So one is like the invite list and making sure you have something like that. I think it's fun to have a very lightweight theme or activity that is optional that people can partake in, but that doesn't dominate the party. And so I used last year I hosted maybe five, five or so happy hours for writers in the Bay Area, like magazine editors, journalists, like bloggers, all sorts of people. And they would often have a thing like bring a copy of one of your favorite books and like put them on a table and you can like write a note on it and do a book swap. And what that meant was that it's not a very imposing activity.

2:25:07You can totally ignore the table and just drink with people and chat if you want. You fall back to it. Yeah. But like if you meet someone and you have no idea who they are, you just say, what book did you bring? And I think it automatically builds in a way to build a relationship. Another one I did for my birthday last year was I said, since this is my first year of being a journalist, my party was secrets themed. And so I had a wall of sticky notes that said secrets on it. And everyone had to write a secret, a piece of celebrity gossip, personal gossip, anything and stick it on the wall. And yeah, and so it's like, lots of my friends do know each other.

2:25:37They can just chat, but also you don't know somebody, you say, what was your secret? So it was great. And I had an artifact. I have the wall up. What makes a good debate?

2:25:48A good debate is like a good game. Both people have to want to be there and have to want to play the game for its own sake. So part of a debate is about clash, right? Debates are not about consensus and being really polite and pretending that you actually agree with each other on a lot. Debate is about actually seeking the parts where you disagree and focusing there, which is something that is naturally uncomfortable to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you do a debate well, both people have decided that for the purpose of this game, for the purpose of ironing out the disagreement and whether it's putting on a performance or like understanding the issue better, you're both willing to really drill in on that tension and on that disagreement and to push hard for your own side.

2:26:30Like you actually don't want someone to say, nevermind, you're right in the middle of a debate, because actually the way that it works best is when you have two fairly balanced sides of a controversial issue and both people are making the best case for their side. And then as the audience, you really get to weigh the best cases against each other. And after the debate, of course, you can say like, actually, you totally convinced me. Like, we're great friends, whatever. But keep the show alive. You've got to keep the show alive. I hate it when something's framed as a debate and people just end up disagreeing the entire time.

2:26:57It's very annoying. do you think there's, I think we're going to see many more of the sort of free press, pirate wire, sort of like sub stack new institution type thing. Obviously you're a little biased and you work there, but it seems to me more obvious that we just have like, why would you ever be a writer? If you have any leverage, why would you be a part of anything bigger than you? Like just be the independent. Oh, I think because a lot of people just don't like to be independent. I mean, this has been interesting for me to think about because I, probably you too, because you're independent.

2:27:38Like I love figuring out my own writing career as part of the game. Like I like trying to figure out how to pay my bills and trying to figure out, should I podcast? Should I write long essays? Should I write short things? I like being full stack. I, when you are a staff writer at a publication, oftentimes you write pieces because your editors tell you to. Your editor hands you a piece. I like coming up with the pieces. I like, and I don't want somebody else to hand me a piece. But like some people like to be handed the idea, right? Or like maybe like the part that they feel really, really good at is like pro styling.

2:28:13Or there are other people who are amazing investigative reporters, but they hate the writing part and their editor will basically rewrite the actual prose for them. But like, I personally just happen to like full stack, but like a lot of people don't. Or like people don't want to go on podcasts. People don't want to think about distribution. The world is definitely rewarding the person like you though. It is. The modern world. Yes, I think so. Right. Yeah. You wrote a post. I don't think this was the title. Maybe the title was in poor taste, but the subtitle was 10 alternatives to having good taste.

2:28:43It reminded me of Nadia Asparova has this piece called being basic as a virtue. anything come to mind as additional points you would make to the virtues of not having good taste or being I don't know there was this excerpt I loved I don't know how to pick my preferences from a catalog of cool when they are so invariably not I don't want to wipe these snapshot memories because they've since lost their shine I am as my taste an unapologetic order of every place I've ever been every person I've ever met everything I've ever loved

2:29:19yeah I think the thing I mean it's kind of like well the reason I write is because I think everyone has a specific life and a voice like one thing that I think about when people are writing sometimes I read a writer and I feel like they are LARPing a writing style they're trying to write like Didion or they're trying to write like David Foster Wallace and you can tell that it's a poor fit for them. You can tell who they're trying to emulate, but they didn't have the experiences that Didion had or that Wallace had. It's like wearing your mom's high heels when you're like a kid, right? Like you're trying something on that doesn't quite fit rather than trying to develop your own voice.

2:29:58And one of the things that I, that annoys me about some of the taste discourse, et cetera, is I think it drives a lot of people to acquire good taste as its own end by kind of mimicking the other people with good taste or like picking from a catalog or like buy this coach, not that coach, like eat at this restaurant, not that restaurant, like watch this film, not that, to the point where you are not attempting to develop your own point of view, which is what taste is. Yeah, it's much more of a form of, I know the references type cultural capital. And that kind of bugs me. I'd rather people just figure out for themselves what they like.

2:30:37you wrote somewhere that you wanted to be a professor when you were younger um do you think any of that has persisted is it any of that inside of what you do now i really like research and i like teaching um i don't like the part where you write spend a year on a paper that 10 people will read and then you have to live in a tiny college town in a suburb of a suburb fair enough a lot of professors want to be self-stackers this This is one thing I've learned since I was like a cool time. Cause I'll still meet professors and I like my academic friends and I talk to them. I meet so many professors who I can tell what they desperately want is my job, but my job didn't exist before.

2:31:18So they had to like get tenure and publish real articles. That's gotta be hard to be like the thing. Yeah. I was, I was born at the wrong time. um you're describing this is very early on i think right when you left subsac as for the project itself the tongue-in-cheek tagline i've been using is duarkash meets ezra klein but a girl how do you think it's going it's so embarrassing that i read that um pretty well mine is the part where i don't podcast yeah okay yeah you said a solo newsletter are podcasts on technology, politics, and culture. Fewer podcasting these days. Yeah. I mean, I guessed more.

2:32:04I don't host, and both of them I think are very good interviewers, very good podcast hosts. But I think subject matter-wise, roughly, yes. I think the thing that I really respect about Ezra is that he is really deep and really smart and really wonky, but he views his role as shaping a broad public discourse. He cares about accessibility. He writes for the New York Times because it does have a particular impact, and his theory of change I think has to do with choosing that over making millions of dollars doing a substack. But then maybe subject matter wise, I cover AI, I cover Silicon Valley. I am more of the world that I suppose Dorkesh embodies.

2:32:42And he also is like very deep in the AI culture. He is known for reading all the papers and trying to understand the technical work. And I think pushing that hard at depth while also doing the public translation is something that I aspire towards. What do you think keeps you earnest?

2:33:08Not quite the same as optimistic. Yeah. But I think it's something that's maybe even more respectable than just pure optimism. But I read you as very earnest. um i think not being earnest is bad for the soul that's a great answer i guess this is a little related my last question there's an old old post i think i can't remember if it's the first one i could find or one of the first this is in 2020 the title of the post is things that don't scale yeah um and i think obviously the background here It's COVID and you're in school. You say, when I think about the future, it feels vast and overwhelming.

2:33:49I don't have a job lined up post-graduation in 2021. Hell, I don't even have a giant job lined up for this fall. I refuse to attend Zoom classes either way. I want to figure things out, but there's too many unknowns and not enough processing power in my brain. Nothing about long-term planning makes sense anymore. What would you tell that Jasmine?

2:34:19I think she's thinking about it the right way. I'm really glad I didn't go to Zoom school. I'm glad I basically dropped out and decided to take a bet on the unknowns and figuring it out rather than forcing myself to do Zoom school just because I didn't know what else I was going to do. I did get a job a bit after getting ready. She just needed a little confidence. I just needed like a month more to figure it out. I think maybe to the earlier conversation about risk, most people like this idea that you have to know like when I quit my job at substick I didn't have any grants I had literally no financial plan other than like I guess I could lose money for a year and it wouldn't be the end of the world um and like most people just need to take the leap first and trust that it's going to work out and there are more and less stupid ways to do that but um I'm really glad to hear that my 2020 self um facing all of those unknowns told herself that it was just going to work out.

2:35:13That's all I got. Thank you. Amazing. Thanks so much. Thanks again for listening or watching to my conversation with Jasmine's son. If you enjoyed it, I will link to Jasmine's sub stack and articles in the description. You can also share the episode with a friend that would go a really long way and is the most impactful thing you can do. You can also like or subscribe or rate five stars wherever you're watching or listening. I'd also like to thank Notion one more time for supporting the show and making what I do possible. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. And you can also check out Notion's new developer platform where you can see how workers and massive extensibility have made Notion a really remarkable tool for working in the AI era.

2:35:54It's been really fun to play around with what's possible with a little bit of vibe coding in workers. In my case, being able to create, digest, and research on my guests that I'm gonna be able to actually sink my teeth into and know where to start and what articles to prioritize of theirs and so on, as well as all kinds of new ways to gain leverage. I was just installing a GitHub repo that Brian Lovin from Notion made where you can basically hook up the X API and create custom CRM of your entire Twitter database and network and then search it and query it. Software is getting really insane and Notions, especially with this new developer platform, has become the ideal hub to work with all of these tools and also categorize everything in a way that is easily searchable, referenceable, and you can actually work with.

2:36:40Being able to work with every model, the models are available the day they come out, being able to work with five coding platforms, Cloud Code, Codex, whatever you're using on that end, and all of your documents and your databases and everything else for you and your team and have them plugged into a single hub is so tremendously helpful. In some sense, Notion feels like my primary creative canvas. If you haven't checked out Notion in a while, I think it'll blow you away how far they've come. And if you're interested in working with the team at Notion, reach out to me at workatjacksondoll.com and I can put you in touch if it seems like it could be a fit.

2:37:17Thank you again for listening or watching. I will see you next time.