1: Jason Liu - The Freedom in Being Nobody

Speaker A: Hey, I'm Jackson Dahl, and I'm excited to share episode 1 of a new interview podcast, Dialectic. I'll have conversations with the sharpest, most creative, and original people I know, or want to know, and it will be wide-ranging, probably covering the stuff I care about most: ideas, ambition, tech, startups, business, art, culture, philosophy, taste. But also it will really be about people. There's an idea from Kevin Kelly I love, which is that the goal of life should be to have become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed. Put another way, you shouldn't aim to be the best, but to be the only.

I called the show Dialectic because it's fun to say, and because if I've been told I'm good at anything, it's sparring with people about their ideas, pushing them to click down one level deeper. I hope this show will feel like watching a great tennis rally, seeing some sparks fly, but ultimately trying to get closer to truth, to lessons, to wisdom. Into really, again, what makes people tick. I think this is going to be a tough balance to strike with an interview show, but as the show progresses, I really hope to push my guests in creative ways.

Episode 1 is with Jason Liu. He's a technologist, machine learning and AI expert, consultant, teacher, and among other things, a guy who can talk. He spent the early part of his career as a software engineer, primarily in machine learning and AI at a company called Stitch Fix. And then he ran into this weird wall where he had a hand injury that prevented him from being able to write code. And it caused him to go off on a number of side quests from jiu-jitsu and freediving and pottery to kind of like reckoning with his ambition in his career, if he couldn't do what he had done for his entire career.

And then he came back around on technology and used a number of new solutions in the form of LLMs for coding and things like Cursor, but also writing purely with his voice and finding clever ways to monetize what was in his brain. In short, he's helping companies navigate the world where LLMs are dominating everything in software. He's spent the last year building a large consulting practice, helping modern AI companies think about all kinds of things from hiring to system implementation to more specific things like RAG or Retrieval Augmented Generation. He also created Instructor, which is a large library with almost a million downloads a month.

And as I mentioned, this man can talk, he writes, he can tweet, he knows how to do volume. And so I'm so excited for you to get to listen to him talk about a whole bunch of things. Most importantly, and I think you'll see this, as much as Jason is quite opinionated, he just has a beginner's mindset and he has sort of a willingness and a humility to approach everything from to use a cliché idea, first principles, in a way that I find really energizing and helpful. So I think you'll learn a lot.

I definitely did, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. So with that, we'll jump into it with Jason talking about sharing lessons from his consulting business with his email subscribers, and specifically how getting paid $700 an hour and $30,000 in a month for doing interviews was actually him getting screwed. Here's Jason. Speaker B: This one company, they're paying me like $700 an hour to do a job interview. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: I was like, oh my God, this is sick. All I gotta do is like, can you tell me more?

At the end of the month, they make me, I make $30,000. Do you think I'm winning or losing? Speaker A: In what dimension? Speaker B: Over like 3 months. Like. Speaker A: You're losing based relatively. Speaker B: Yeah, because the recruiter made $160,000. Because the recruiter takes 20% of first year salary. Okay. So when the head of AI joins, the question he asks first is, how long has Jason been around and how long will Jason be around? Because I think I saw him on a podcast and it's really nice that like someone with so much like domain expertise is on the project.

You know, like the roadmap he presented me was like— Speaker A: Is your why he got hired? Speaker B: I'm not going to say that, but it felt like it, right? They get all, they get this 4 engineers and this head of AI. 5 months later, they raised the Series B. So like, I make $30,000, the recruiter makes $150,000, the founder's up a couple million, and like, even the head of AI's equity just went up. I was the most exploited person in the room. Speaker A: Is there, is the meta lesson here that like, this is how, like, this is how, um, the most effective people in the game of capitalism play?

Yeah. Speaker B: So now my understanding is all the questions I have to ask has to point to what is the biggest outcome possible, right? Like what I said was I'll lay your bricks and I would ask is like, I'm a really good bricklayer, right? Right, right. The recruiter is like, I'll find you a great team. Yeah, right. And then the developer is like, what is it going to cost you if people move in 6 months late? What is it going to cost you if you can't get this done before the winter comes?

Speaker B: So now my understanding is all the questions I have to ask has to point to what is the biggest outcome possible, right? Like what I said was I'll lay your bricks and I would ask is like, I'm a really good bricklayer, right? Right, right. The recruiter is like, I'll find you a great team. Yeah, right. And then the developer is like, what is it going to cost you if people move in 6 months late? What is it going to cost you if you can't get this done before the winter comes?

Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: It's going to cost you millions of dollars. Speaker A: Right, right, right, right. Speaker B: And so I understand this other— this other developer might be cheaper. Speaker A: Most people are like, oh man, my brick— my bricklaying rate is— is not high enough. Speaker B: Yeah, right. The hardest work— the person working the hardest at a hotel is the person like changing the sheets. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Speaker B: But a capital allocator is just like, okay, where do I park $100 million? Anyways, so that's kind of like, so I tell all these lessons over like a couple of weeks.

I was like, oh, these people are so committed and you don't need like that many people. Speaker A: Do you think they were committed because of the story or because you were pulling back the curtain on reality? Maybe that's an extreme statement. Speaker B: I think it's both. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right. It's like, okay, well, if this is like how real this person wants to be, like, I don't know. Like maybe they want to ask more personal questions. Maybe they want to understand what the journey was. Like, I'm also very real.

Like, I left tech after 10 years and I started consulting. It wasn't like I graduated and I wanted to make some like fast money. Speaker A: Right. There's a— Speaker B: but can I tell the Acid story? Yeah, talk to me about it. This is the thing I think post-Acid, I hope you have this feeling too. Okay, so I'm on Acid. I'm like in Oregon. I'm looking at a lake. I'm thinking about my responsibilities as like in my family and to my partner at the time. And I like, my vision goes to white and I see God.

And God just says, Jason, you're trying so hard to be a somebody. Let me give you the feeling of being a nobody. And for like some moment, I get the feeling of like nobodyness. And the world was like super light and like everything was pleasant. And I was like, oh my God, like there's just Like, I don't know how to describe it, but like, just imagine this idea of like being a nobody is like so much more liberating and it lets you do anything that you want and like play with everything.

It's like, I'm just trying shit. Speaker A: When you say being nobody, being a nobody, are you describing being someone insignificant or you're describing not being anything or not being someone? Speaker B: Not being anything in relation to other people. Like, I think being a somebody, at least in the Confucian sense, there's like the roles you play. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like, are you a— you must be a good son, a good teacher, a good student, a good husband, a good brother. Yeah. All right. And it's like, okay, take that all away.

It's like, oh, there's no like commitment to anything. There's no quest. Right. It's like you talk about like there is a me-shaped hole in the world. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But now I think of it as like if you're in a river and there's a little divot, the water will just kind of like rush in. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But now I think of it as like if you're in a river and there's a little divot, the water will just kind of like rush in. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And like you make the U-shaped hole.

Yeah. Right. It wasn't like the hole was there and the water flows in. It's like this little swell is what creates the bigger like reservoir. And yeah, after the trip, I was like, oh, like, yeah, I shouldn't try to be anybody. Let me just like fuck around. Speaker A: How do you relate that to meaning and purpose? Speaker B: It's just created along the way. Speaker A: Is it observed in hindsight or are you running a purpose and meaning algorithm upfront around intention and how you evaluate what you choose to do?

Or are you sort of just realizing the meaning when you look back? Speaker B: It's definitely looking back, right? Because it's like, I don't think, because everything I'm doing is like through first principles, right? It's like, oh, like I'm so overworked, I gotta go hire people or hiring is hard. Like, you definitely can probably make more progress with better advisors upfront. But then it's like, there's so many myths on like what you should and shouldn't do. Like, I don't know what the trade-offs are. Like everyone says in the VC world, you should have like a co-founder.

But everyone I know is going through like co-founder breakups. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right? Everyone's, people are like, oh, you should have like married like the girl at 26. And now my friends are getting divorced. And I was like, okay, we're actually, I'm just lighter. But if you go to the water analogy, it's like the water doesn't see the crack and like want to open it up. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right? Everyone's, people are like, oh, you should have like married like the girl at 26. And now my friends are getting divorced.

And I was like, okay, we're actually, I'm just lighter. But if you go to the water analogy, it's like the water doesn't see the crack and like want to open it up. Speaker A: There's not an opinionatedness there. Speaker B: Right. But when you just, when you fill in the crack, like he can still like split the mountain. I don't know how to describe it, but just. Yeah. Speaker A: You don't, you're like a highly agentic person who doesn't seem to plan very much at all, who's just sort of like iterating.

I think that's like inside of a lot of this. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Do you plan at all? Speaker B: I have, okay, so I think there's a time to plan and I think most people plan too much. Okay. I have rarely planned more and like had a better outcome. You know, but I don't build bridges or airplanes. Speaker A: You're right. Yeah, there's a contextual kind of gradient. What about judgment? Do you think you have good judgment or do you think much about judgment? Speaker B: I think I think more about elasticity.

I want to believe that I have like so much abundance. If I make the wrong hire or make the mistake, it'll still be fine. Speaker A: And you're also a live player, so you're going to keep iterating regardless. Speaker B: Yeah, it's like 'Cause there is a judgment of like, oh, should I have lent this person money? And like, will they pay me back on time? But really, I think it's just like, I want to live a life that's so abundant that like, if I give it and you like bounce, it's like, okay, well, I made a mistake, continue going down the path.

Like, I think the goal is for me, it's like, I want to have better judgment. Like overthinking judgment is still much easier than just like, okay, here's the money. Like if you give it back, this is sick. But if you don't, like, I will be okay because I want to be. Speaker A: And you're also a live player, so you're going to keep iterating regardless. Speaker B: Yeah, it's like 'Cause there is a judgment of like, oh, should I have lent this person money? And like, will they pay me back on time?

But really, I think it's just like, I want to live a life that's so abundant that like, if I give it and you like bounce, it's like, okay, well, I made a mistake, continue going down the path. Like, I think the goal is for me, it's like, I want to have better judgment. Like overthinking judgment is still much easier than just like, okay, here's the money. Like if you give it back, this is sick. But if you don't, like, I will be okay because I want to be. Speaker A: So you're resilient, but are you— do you think you're limiting what you— your potential?

This goes back to being somebody, maybe, but are you limiting your potential because you're like— is there a possibility space that you're not accessing because you're not, um, for lack of a better term, planning? Speaker B: Yeah, but I also think like in the advice article I wrote, there's like a great person is not a good person. Speaker A: Okay, say more. Speaker B: And I don't even know if being more ambitious will make my life better. And I had hurt my hands earlier, like in my 20s from being an ambitious person.

So like, I don't even know. Like if I go fill the space of ambition, like I'm still taking from something else and like, I don't know if it's always worth it. Speaker A: Is ambition and sort of long-term planning are parallel track, but there's plenty of ambitious people, let's say, who are like, don't really have a vision and aren't really planning, but they're just sort of like vibrating really aggressively. There are also people who are not ambitious, but who have like well-thought-out, structured plans for,, making sure their family situation ends up working out or whatever.

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Are— do you not think of those as being correlated? Speaker B: I don't think it served me much. I actually got a coach like last week with like a really great breakthrough, but literally the week before I was like, man, like I should make sure I have like 6 months of salary saved up for every single employee. If the business does not go well, I want to make sure I have like enough severance, like everyone taken care of. But then if I want to move to New York, then I have to, right?

Right. I was super anxious and I just had this conversation. I don't even remember what the conversation was about, but at the end I was like, I will just figure it out. Everything's okay. Because I also— the future version of me will only be more capable, smarter, and it'll just be easier for that person too. So worrying about the future is almost not trusting of my future self. But I have no evidence that I make worse decisions over time, and I have no evidence that I can't figure things out. So I made that connection, and now I'm just much less anxious.

Speaker A: I think also for many of us, at least for myself, thinking thoughtfully about the future or planning even is rarely decoupled from anxiousness and worrying about it. Yeah. And those don't necessarily need to be the case. But I think for most of us, like the reason probably like less planning is helpful is that all the planning is always coming with that like anxious, which prevents, to your point, like being more of a live player, Resiliency. Yeah. These things. When was the acid trip? Speaker B: Like 2 years ago, 3 years ago.

Speaker A: And has the, like, has this primary lesson like lodged itself very firmly or does it come up at times? Speaker B: I don't think it's lodged. I just think I remind myself that the feeling of nobody is also like equally as great as feeling like like you're somebody. Hmm. Speaker A: You've, you've written a lot about like confidence and fear. Obviously there's some connection here, but I'm curious how you've like managed to move through and you've also across like a whole bunch of different domains pre and post the hand injury, like jiu-jitsu, ceramics, all the recent stuff work-wise, like is the anchoring around moving through fear.

How tied is it to this? Like, oh, I don't need to necessarily be somebody, or are there other, other ways you kind of like— are you acting despite fear? Are you moving through fear anyway? Like what? Speaker B: What? Speaker A: Maybe, maybe the better version of the question is like, what is the relationship to fear now? Speaker B: I don't know if I have fear. I know I'm very anxious. But I also know it's usually not very productive. It's like I'm not someone that like forgets my passport at the airport, so I don't need to be anxious about the flight or anything, right?

But I mean, the line I think about is like, confidence is the memory of success. And I think I'm finally old enough to just have succeeded enough times at the things I've tried that the next time I try something, there's just not much doubt. I don't know how it would be possible to do that when you were 15. Well, what did you do? Well, I just learned jiu-jitsu and I got my ass beat for like 6 months, and then one day I got better. And then, you know, someone else came in the gym and they were a little bit heavier than me, but they hadn't trained and I beat them.

And I was like, oh, this is learning something. I've learned something. And, and then you— and then all your friends beat you up and you're like, fuck, like, I'm not I wasn't good at all. That was luck. Then you go to another gym, a different gym that they haven't seen all your tricks. You're like, oh, I'm learning again. Right? Same with pottery. It's like you do stuff, it's bad, it gets better. You develop language to figure out how you want to express yourself and your taste. And you just see yourself get better constantly.

And I don't think that's like one accident. I think I try very hard to be better at things. But at this point, the next thing I do, I just know that that's going to happen. Like, I've never not been able to just like go past, like through the wall. Speaker A: And now at this point, you have enough of a memory built up. Yeah. Speaker B: But it wasn't like, you know, like you just grow up with this like level of confidence. It was just like, oh, well, at this point, like, why would I?

I have no proof that I'm going to be like a loser anymore. Speaker A: When proof is what you get wrapped up in when you're busy making plans, you're like, you're sort of like looking for proof that the next step of the plan is going to work. Speaker B: Yeah. And you think you're smarter because you can come up with all the edge cases. Right? And it's like, I don't know if it works that way because you don't actually know what you're gonna do then. And maybe now, like the memory of success is like, oh wow, like future Jason's gonna figure it out because they'll have more information than current Jason.

So let me just solve current Jason problems and then future Jason can solve future Jason problems. Like why am I saving up so much money for future Jason? Do I think future Jason is like a bum? Who like got lucky once and could never do it again. Right. Speaker A: I think that's how a lot of us act. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Like when I started the business, I just put— I just started a new bank account and I was like, great, I'm just going to like live in my mom's house for like 2 months and let me just like do it again.

And now this bank account in 1 year has as much money as I had saved up all of my 20s. And I was like, oh, interesting. Speaker A: And you got to be a beginner again. Speaker B: Yeah, right. Speaker A: Which almost maybe adds a lightness to it. Speaker B: Yeah, but it's like, yeah, because you have the safety net of like, okay, I can do these things. But also because I think I don't have many mentors, you do so many things from first principles that everything you do, you just deeply believe in.

There's very little like, oh man, well, like they told me to watch out for this and they told me to watch out for that. I just had to like do this thing very scared, see the result and be like, okay, well, like for example, I had scaled down my consulting revenue to do the course. I scaled down my revenue. So I was like doubling every month for 5 months. And then I scaled down 80% of that income to do the course. And again, I was like, man, like, was it a mistake to cancel all those contracts to make this bet?

Like, What if they're going to think I'm a scammer on the internet? Oh my God, like, it took me 5 months to get here and I just threw it all away to record YouTube videos. Like, oh my God, what did I do? Then you do the course and in that 1 month you made more money than all the 5 months combined. Like, okay, now I truly understand the importance of taking big bets and big swings. And like, at this point, I haven't like really failed in a dramatic way. And maybe that's a perspective thing of when it doesn't work out, I don't really see it as a failure.

I can't even tell at this point, but it's like, oh yeah, like I need to be taking bigger bets because that was like clearly actually a medium-sized bet. I didn't even understand. Speaker A: Yeah, the Overton window is moving. Speaker B: Right. And now it's like, I'm willing to take bets using revenue that I have not made yet. Whereas before it's like, I will never have a month with negative cash flow. I can't do that. That's like too scary. What if it like continues to slip? And now it's like, oh, I'm gonna start this newsletter.

Let me go hire a writer and a designer. Let me set this up. And then I'll go like sell the thing. Speaker A: You're more elastic too. Speaker B: Yeah. And you have the confidence now of like, oh yeah, I like the money will come. So much more willing to invest money now to just make my life easier. Whereas before it's like, I want to be paid. I want to pay everyone else on success, but then I give them like 30%. And now it's like, oh, I'm willing to pay you $10,000 this month to help me out because I know that the ROI is still going to be worth it.

And that was the fact that no one told you that and you just believe it, I think is very, very refreshing. Speaker A: The entire through line of this too is one of, and I suspect this would generalize to many kind of elite performers, is that in some true sense, I think if I told you like I'm actually resetting you to zero in whatever money, but also other things, at least the vibe you're projecting is one of like an excitement to get to like play the game again. Yeah, but it's like, or at the very least a lack of a preciousness of like I'm on my pile and like I can't possibly get come down from this like local maximum.

Speaker B: Yeah, but this is the funny thing that I told my friend. It's like, I want to be rich the same way I want a six-pack. It's like, it's just going to be what I deserve. And like, I don't deserve a six-pack right now. Speaker A: Why not? Speaker B: I'm just not working out. But like— You get what you deserve though. Speaker A: Right. Do you think that's true? Speaker B: No. Okay. But I think you— Like the advice article I wrote is like, advice for young people, lies I tell myself.

I feel like most people miss this part, but it's like, you have to just believe it because then what, like, maybe I'm acknowledging that the world is like much more difficult and like scary and like more sinister, but if you don't believe those lies that like, that memory is confidence, memory is success, or that pessimists are losers, or like great people might not be like good people. The world just like feels harder. Speaker A: And you have little to stand on. It sort of collapses. There's like a fuzziness to everything.

Speaker B: Yeah. And like you're kind of playing life. Okay, I'm going to make a really silly segue, which is, have you ever played Elden Ring? Speaker A: I haven't. I know, I'm pretty familiar. Speaker B: But people really yell at you for playing the game a certain way. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Right? It's like, oh, like you use magic. Like you shouldn't do that. Okay. Speaker A: Right? Speaker B: And it's like, no, no, no, you're just, if you choose not to do those things, you're just playing a harder version of the game.

Right. Like other people beat, like if the person who complains about you using magic, there's a guy who's beating the game without rolling. I know another guy beating the game without like leveling up. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Right? It's like, oh, like you use magic. Like you shouldn't do that. Okay. Speaker A: Right? Speaker B: And it's like, no, no, no, you're just, if you choose not to do those things, you're just playing a harder version of the game. Right. Like other people beat, like if the person who complains about you using magic, there's a guy who's beating the game without rolling.

I know another guy beating the game without like leveling up. Speaker A: Right, right. You can make it increasingly harder on yourself without arbitrary. Yeah. There's a lot inside of that. Speaker B: Because the lie is like, oh, the only way to play this game is like with just a big sword and you just gotta hit things and dodge. And if you can't do that, you're not, you have no skill. I was like, no, you're just, you're just, if you are a pessimist, you are just playing your life as a challenge run for no reason.

Speaker A: The only real boundary of play is what the game designers coded and maybe even something beyond that. Are you, do you think you're putting any boundaries like that in, into your life now? Right now? Speaker B: Probably, but I don't know if I notice them anymore. Speaker A: Yeah. Like, I think this is kind of growing up a little bit is like, reducing, taking more and more of those things and like seeing them. Speaker B: Like growing up, like, so it was like I grew up super poor. I remember like, like I had the conversation last week.

I beat the first 3 Pokémons that I ever played without using a potion. Because I was just like saving up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker A: In case I need a, the hoarding mentality. Speaker B: In case I need them, right? And I was like, oh, I see. I'm just fucking, that's just like poor behavior, right? It was like the first time I ever made a financial bet was like last two, like this last quarter when I was like, oh, let me go hire a writer to build out the thing before I sell it.

Because I don't, there is no in case. The next step is you make money. Speaker A: In case I need a, the hoarding mentality. Speaker B: In case I need them, right? And I was like, oh, I see. I'm just fucking, that's just like poor behavior, right? It was like the first time I ever made a financial bet was like last two, like this last quarter when I was like, oh, let me go hire a writer to build out the thing before I sell it. Because I don't, there is no in case.

The next step is you make money. Speaker A: Right. Right. Speaker B: Like that's, yeah, you're supposed to hire a writer to promote the thing and build the advertisements and then you just run the advertisements and then more money will appear. Speaker A: Yeah, everybody else sitting around being like, what if I need potions? Yeah. Speaker B: And I was like, oh, actually, like, I should just use the potions. And because as you play the game, you make money. And if you don't die so much, you actually lose less of the experience.

And then you're like, oh, I'm trying to just figure out like, what are the random rules I've set for myself that's making my life a challenge run? And just like not do that. Speaker A: Right? Speaker B: Like I'm fine. Like at the age of 30, I like used my first potion. It is incredible. Speaker A: Like, oh man, that cuts deep, man. I think that hits for a lot of us. Speaker B: It's like, yeah, it's like I'm like super cheap on flights for no reason. I hired an EA and now it's like I don't even know how much the flights cost.

My life is just better. But it's like, well, I do this for business, so it's all gonna, it all adds up to being a net positive. Speaker B: It's like, yeah, it's like I'm like super cheap on flights for no reason. I hired an EA and now it's like I don't even know how much the flights cost. My life is just better. But it's like, well, I do this for business, so it's all gonna, it all adds up to being a net positive. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right. It's like I hired a writer, so I don't have to like be on a computer all day.

Speaker A: There's an essay I really like. Some, I can find it after. And the title of it is literally just called Things You're Allowed to Do. And it's this. Speaker B: Oh my God. Speaker A: It's just like this possibility space of potions where it's like, Oh, if you want to learn something, there's like PhD students you can pay like $30 an hour to personally tutor you. Speaker B: Yeah. And like you can just do it. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like even with the courses, like, oh man, like I'm like, I don't want to be seen as a scammer because I'm selling these courses.

Yep. And then I bought a book for $300 calling it like how to price effectively. I read that book. I made like 6 lines of changes in my, uh, in my website. And within 3 months, I closed a contract for $110,000, all paid up front over like a $300 book. And I was like, oh, the book was free. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: But everybody else is like, I don't know, $300. Right. Speaker B: Like there's a, the other mindset is like a TikTok I watched was like, It's like this fucking dude's like, he comes with bags.

What if I told you this bag is $500? Would you buy this bag? And it's like his message was like, if you have like a much more like, like the poor mentality is like, why does like, how, fuck you. Like I'm not buying a $300 bag. But the abundance mentality is like, oh, what's in the bag? So the other thing now I'm always asking is like, okay, what's in the bag? We talk about price afterwards, but like what's actually in the bag? Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: But everybody else is like, I don't know, $300.

Right. Speaker B: Like there's a, the other mindset is like a TikTok I watched was like, It's like this fucking dude's like, he comes with bags. What if I told you this bag is $500? Would you buy this bag? And it's like his message was like, if you have like a much more like, like the poor mentality is like, why does like, how, fuck you. Like I'm not buying a $300 bag. But the abundance mentality is like, oh, what's in the bag? So the other thing now I'm always asking is like, okay, what's in the bag?

We talk about price afterwards, but like what's actually in the bag? Speaker A: Do you think how there's a, there's a sort of meta point that I'm quite interested in, which is like, is, is, can you teach agency? Can you move people sort of up the agency curve? Have you taught either personal, like friends in your life or clients or in your, in your courses? Like, do you relate at all to the idea of teaching agency? That's, that's in some ways kind of what you're talking about? And if so, like, have you found any effective ways of like helping people to see the water on this type of stuff to use their potions?

Speaker B: I think so. I mean, part of the consulting course is like the last section is on proposals. And the message I have is how much you're able to charge is a function of how well you can describe what they truly want. And be responsible for it. Like if I lay bricks for a builder, 6 months from now, they are not celebrating the bricklaying. What are they celebrating? Oh, it got built on time. Or, you know, there were no— Speaker A: Or better yet, we sold the apartments in the building.

Exactly. Speaker B: Right. Oh, now it becomes— Speaker A: We're getting rent payments. Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. Okay, well, how can you figure out on what spectrum you're comfortably able to sit in? And then demonstrate proof that you can actually deliver on those objectives. And the better you do that, the better you understand that problem and the more you can demonstrate accountability for that final outcome, the more you can ask for. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right. And not only that, maybe this is the tie with agency is the more you do that, the less you are a commodity.

Because now my services include like, I will invite you to dinners. That's not like an hourly rate that one bills. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But if I know your goal is to raise a Series B, what you can include in your offer as like a person with high agency is very different than I will write you some code. The vessel might be code, but now it becomes, oh, I'll build you the product and then work with your users to figure out what needs to improve. I could train your team to build this themselves or also hire for you.

I can also help you understand how this product becomes a product that collects data, then help you like navigate that roadmap on your pitch deck and explain this to investors. And I can introduce you to investors and I can introduce you to my friends who can give you feedback as long as you know what they actually want. Right. And I think anytime I've hired somebody, if they asked me what was at stake, Why did I need to hire somebody now? They would have— and they truly demonstrated that they could do that.

I would be personally willing to pay way more. But instead, I'm kind of gluing people together and I'm gluing tasks together because it's not quite there yet. But now if they could do that, I'm probably getting days of my life back per week. And how much do I value that? Is like a percentage of my whole life. Right. Speaker A: Do you see yourself as sort of intentionally building any amount of leverage? So much of what you, that answer in some ways is just like giving other people leverage. Speaker B: I don't think I'm good at that yet.

Speaker A: Interesting. I see some of that, but say more. Speaker B: I just know I'm not that good. Like, I think in the extremes, I still sometimes think, oh man, like I should have done this myself. And if that's the case, I don't even think it's their fault. It's probably because I did not explain the what or the when or the how or the why. And I need to take that role seriously because you're so used to being the ex— like, execution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But what that means is really it's just like a bricklayer yelling at a bricklayer.

Like nobody's winning and nobody's impressed. Speaker A: And you're dribbling many levels down. Speaker B: Right. You know, it's like, oh, I'm just like yelling at someone for like doing the dishes poorly. It's like, no, no, but like, how's the family? Right? Like that's— and so I don't think I figured it out yet. Speaker A: You've hired some people recently. On the note of leverage. What does that feel like? Speaker B: Still hard. I wish— it's like, I wish they could tell me what I want. Right. Speaker A: Aren't you in the business of telling people what they want?

Speaker B: And because I know what they want. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker A: Aren't you in the business of telling people what they want? Speaker B: And because I know what they want. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Oh, really? Which is why I feel very good about asking for like like more of the result. Speaker A: See, you're, you would, you would you say that you are, it's not that you're so good at telling people what they should want. It's actually that you're on some level like empathetic to what they really want or need and good at identifying that.

Does that distinction make sense? Speaker B: Yeah, it's specifically in the, I am building machine learning products that need to collect data to create this idea to fly, like that part. I've just been doing that for 5 years. So if you've been doing that for less than 5, I feel pretty good that I can just tell you where the bodies are. But am I good at marketing and newsletters? No. 50. So am I like between hiring employee and paying like $700 an hour for a coach, I would almost rather hire the coach or the agency.

Speaker A: This goes back to being told what to do. Speaker B: Right. And it's like, this is actually out of my skill range, in which case I need to find someone who's better at me than that. But that's like the CEO needing to hire a VP. Speaker A: You mentioned not having mentors. Yeah. Isn't that kind of what a coach— have you not had mentors by choice or by circumstance? Speaker B: Probably both. Speaker A: Okay. Do you view mentors as something different than the kind of coaching scenario you just described?

Speaker A: You mentioned not having mentors. Yeah. Isn't that kind of what a coach— have you not had mentors by choice or by circumstance? Speaker B: Probably both. Speaker A: Okay. Do you view mentors as something different than the kind of coaching scenario you just described? Speaker B: No, I just, but again, like after selling a course, I was like, damn, like I'm actually helping people. I wonder who could help me. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like I'm, like it's not a flex to have no mentors. I think that's also like a challenge.

That's also like a silly challenge run, you know? It's like, oh, I beat the game without a tutorial. Like I beat the game with like no equipment. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: It's like, okay, well, why? Speaker A: Man, that generalizes so devastatingly. Like, just go down, like, yeah. Speaker B: Say, I don't want to ask for help. Speaker A: I mean, this is just what therapy is. Speaker B: Right? It's like, oh, you want to ask for help? You're going to beat the entire game without doing any side quests?

Have there been— You're just underleveled. Speaker A: Have there been any areas where you've— maybe this coaching example is one, but any recent areas where you've asked for help in a way that, like, was a little glass shattering? Where you finally realized you should have been asking for help? Speaker B: I think it's like every time I've asked for help. Speaker A: Yeah. Why are you perpetually asking for help? Speaker B: I'm working on it. Speaker A: Yeah, I think we all are. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, like the— so the coach I hired is like just like a life coach.

And the first call was like, dude, I feel anxious all the time. I feel like I have to just I have to keep working harder and like the moment I stop, I'll be homeless. And then afterwards, I'm just like, no, life will always be easier for me because I've built, like I've set myself up already. Like it only gets easier and I don't have to be someone. Right. But it's like for $1,000, you can change your mind. That's great. And the next day I lost a client. And then I go, oh, okay, I guess I'll tell Tom I'm available.

And then I got, it came back. Speaker B: I think it's like every time I've asked for help. Speaker A: Yeah. Why are you perpetually asking for help? Speaker B: I'm working on it. Speaker A: Yeah, I think we all are. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, like the— so the coach I hired is like just like a life coach. And the first call was like, dude, I feel anxious all the time. I feel like I have to just I have to keep working harder and like the moment I stop, I'll be homeless.

And then afterwards, I'm just like, no, life will always be easier for me because I've built, like I've set myself up already. Like it only gets easier and I don't have to be someone. Right. But it's like for $1,000, you can change your mind. That's great. And the next day I lost a client. And then I go, oh, okay, I guess I'll tell Tom I'm available. And then I got, it came back. Speaker A: The variance is way lower. Speaker B: Yeah, and I was like, oh, like this client turned, great, I can email two people, see if one of them is interested.

And then they were, and I was like, great, nothing changed. Like it turns out even the JSON 4 days in the future could have handled it. And I was like stressed out for a week with like a headache. And then it turns out Jason can just like send an email and get another client. Why? Because I built my life right. Speaker A: Do you think, do you think more people should be consulting or fewer? Speaker B: I don't know what a young person has to offer. Speaker A: What's a young person?

Speaker B: Like a new grad. Okay. Yeah, like I don't know. I don't know what, because what I do is I just kind of just tell you all the mistakes I've made. Right. Speaker A: It's very much a product of experience. Speaker B: Yeah. I'm purely just like, I don't have that many frameworks. Like I just have like 3 or 4 frameworks that I have applied. You know, I don't have like this like 30-page SOP of like, this is how you fire somebody, this is how you hire somebody. But just along my vertical, I'm just very specialized.

Speaker A: And you're also doing less producing these days than you maybe used to be. Maybe an important definition in the kind of contract work or consulting work. You're teaching more than you're producing. Speaker B: Yeah. In that same sense, I think it, I don't know if even, like, should people be consulting is the question. I think one thing that could be more interesting, should more people be independent contractors? Speaker A: Right. That's a much better version of the same question. Speaker B: And I kind of think the answer is yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Like I'm going back to Waterloo, like, like, if I went back to Waterloo and I gave a talk, what success would look like is [redacted address], someone says, oh my God, Jason, I went to your talk. And I've just started like a solo business of like me and like 3 people and we're making like a million dollars a year. Because that risk feels very low now. Right? I don't know how many people I could give a talk to and they say, oh my God, Jason, I raised venture capital.

Now I run like a $100 million company even. I think that's like very, very hard still. Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Like I'm going back to Waterloo, like, like, if I went back to Waterloo and I gave a talk, what success would look like is [redacted address], someone says, oh my God, Jason, I went to your talk. And I've just started like a solo business of like me and like 3 people and we're making like a million dollars a year. Because that risk feels very low now. Right? I don't know how many people I could give a talk to and they say, oh my God, Jason, I raised venture capital.

Now I run like a $100 million company even. I think that's like very, very hard still. Speaker A: Arguably getting harder. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think with AI, I just think there's going to be so many more like individual small businesses making a couple million a year and having like a fairly calm life. Speaker A: Can you distinguish, I guess in my head, being an entrepreneur? Yeah. Being being independent, but specifically like building your own product or, and I guess obviously it could be entrepreneurial in a service sense, but I'm kind of drawing it producing something of your own versus servicing somebody independently, whether that being in the kind of like agency type work or just being an independent talented person who isn't a full-time employee.

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Is it worth drawing that distinction? And is your point about AI, does it apply to both of those things? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Is it worth drawing that distinction? And is your point about AI, does it apply to both of those things? Speaker B: I think so. Right. It's like, it's like if I became the next McKinsey, the problem I'm actually solving is just recruiting. I don't know if I want to solve that problem. I think Hormozi has an example of different service industries are solving different problems.

If you are doing personal training, everyone wants to be a personal trainer. So your problem is marketing, getting customers, getting funnels. But if you hire cleaners, then your problem is just hiring because no one wants to clean their house. So I think in the services industry, it's also kind of the same thing of like, what are the kind of problems you want to solve? And I think if the problem you want to solve is just scaling your own knowledge work as an independent person in like 2024, there's like no better time.

I think so many people can be having like a great life. If you want to do like the big mission and solve problems for like 7 years in a row, like I've done that, which is why it's like more fun for me to be independent because I just get to have Taco Tuesday with my friends. Speaker A: Is that the only thing you miss? About working at a big company? Or is that the only real appeal? Speaker B: Yeah, you have more resources to make longer-term bets. I think if I didn't have the hand injury, I would probably still try to go into like Anthropic and OpenAI because you want to be part of like the Manhattan Project of this time.

But now that I don't think that's in the cards for me, at least in the next couple of years, it's like, well, I guess I'm just supposed to enjoy my life, which is like not the worst thing. Speaker A: Is that the only thing you miss? About working at a big company? Or is that the only real appeal? Speaker B: Yeah, you have more resources to make longer-term bets. I think if I didn't have the hand injury, I would probably still try to go into like Anthropic and OpenAI because you want to be part of like the Manhattan Project of this time.

But now that I don't think that's in the cards for me, at least in the next couple of years, it's like, well, I guess I'm just supposed to enjoy my life, which is like not the worst thing. Speaker A: Not the worst thing. If you could, well, maybe worth just talking about like hand injury-wise, you can code now, but at less volume and less speed than you used to be able to, or just the diminishing returns that eventually you It hurts? Speaker B: Yeah. I think if we got in a heated argument and I texted you really fast for like 20 minutes, my hands would hurt.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: You know what I mean? I can't text that much. It hasn't really affected my eating or anything like that. But even when I write, it's all speech-to-text. Speaker A: What about writing code? There's no writing code. Cursor. Cursor. Speaker B: Yeah. But the cursor input is speech-to-text, right? Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: So I just select code and I talk. Crazy. Speaker A: If I told you you could have a meaningful level of impact at a Manhattan Project type company without writing code, maybe it's teaching, maybe it's managing, something like that.

Like, would that be appealing? Speaker A: Wow. Speaker B: So I just select code and I talk. Crazy. Speaker A: If I told you you could have a meaningful level of impact at a Manhattan Project type company without writing code, maybe it's teaching, maybe it's managing, something like that. Like, would that be appealing? Speaker B: At this current point, I think the bigger question is like, what is the problem solving? It's like, if I'm managing, am I solving the bureaucracy problem? Is that the problem I want to solve? Is sales the problem I want to solve?

Speaker A: That's a pessimistic way of looking at managing or cynical. Speaker B: But it's also realistic at times, right? Speaker A: But the other version of the picture would be like, you do a lot of teaching in your current work. You're clearly decent at it. And a great manager is somebody who just teaches and uplifts and enables really talented people. It's like a— Speaker B: Sure. Speaker A: Phil Jackson is a great coach. Speaker B: Yeah. I think if the problem is interesting, I would be interested, which is like a shitty answer, but that's kind of like, yeah.

Speaker A: What are you motivated by? Speaker B: I want to figure out how to live a good life. Yeah, I think that's like a weird answer, but I think that's it. Like, it would be great to sort of be in my 40s and like talk to my kids. This is like, yeah, I lived a great life. Let me tell you how to like, how to like look at the world. That would be super cool. Speaker A: There's some teaching inside of that too. Speaker B: Yeah. Like I want to think I know how to live a good life and be right.

Speaker A: Do you think you were motivated by the same thing 5 years ago? Speaker B: No, no. I think 5 years ago was like legacy and like, you know, leaving an impact on the world. Speaker A: And do you think you will be motivated by what you are now in 5 years or maybe in 10 years? Speaker B: That would suggest that there is something more important than living a good life, which I think is possible. Right. Speaker A: Well, then there's maybe a distinction here, which is being motivated to live a good life for yourself and being motivated to figure out what living a good life means.

I think you were saying the second thing. Speaker B: Yeah. I think success would really be— I think success would really be like my kids going like, yeah, I did the thing Dad thing. And like, I think he's right. Speaker A: It's like the playbook. Speaker B: Yeah. That, I think that, uh, that's like, that's a good, that's a good generational impact, I think. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And, and maybe that, maybe that's some grand thing and maybe it rolls down to like a couple of tidbits of like, use the potions and whatever else.

Oh, yes. Don't be, be, be, be, you don't have to be someone, whatever. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I like it. It's like beat the game and then do the challenge runs. And the challenge runs are really fucking cool. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I like it. It's like beat the game and then do the challenge runs. And the challenge runs are really fucking cool. Speaker A: Are there any challenge runs that are interesting to you? It doesn't have to be in business. Speaker B: I mean, in business, it's just like, yeah, I just like put all my money into my savings.

I started a bank account and I was like, let's, wow, it took me 8 months to save up as much money as I did in like 7 years. Cool. Speaker A: And also that's illustrative of the ways that maybe the goalposts might move. Speaker B: Right. But that's also just like, oh wow, like, you know, that's kind of like a, like you beat the, what's that speedrun one? That's like any percentage, right? Oh, that's cool. Like I'm not doing the like start in VC and make a billion dollar challenge run.

Like I think that's, yeah, I don't know. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But Like one thing I would love to do in some part of my life is make like $100,000 selling art. Right. That's more, I guess that's more of like a side quest and a challenge one. I don't really know, but like I have some of these like fun missions along the way, but they're not all like business related. Yeah. Because it's like, again, it's like being rich and having the six pack to me is like the same goal.

If I do a couple of things and like live this lifestyle, You just like get the six-pack. Do you, you know what I mean? It's like if I just develop my skills in marketing and like learn a little bit about like, you know, like sales and positioning, hey, you get a business, right? It was like pretty cool. And you can like, and once you figure out this like business thing, what you realize is just like there's so much value out there to capture and all you have to do to like make more money is to present something that the world wants.

And it's like so obvious now. So, okay, great. If I ever need money, I just have to like offer the world something. Speaker A: Well, on the note of maybe other things or non-business things, I see you as someone who's pretty prolific or at least done a whole bunch of different things. And yet you also, are at least fairly focused and consolidated in some sense? Like, do you think that most people swing to one end of that spectrum? Do you— is that something you're intentionally thinking about? Is it just comes easy to you?

How have you managed to— Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know if I have focus. I think I'm I spend 10 hours a week on TikTok. Okay. Speaker A: That's focused. Speaker B: It's crazy. If I value myself at the hourly rate that I bill on— Speaker A: That content better be pretty good. Speaker B: It's crazy. I don't know if I'm actually that focused. I think the thing that is my superpower is sort of connecting the dots across many unfocused things. Speaker A: Mm-hmm. Speaker B: Right. It's like, it's like I have like 2 newsletters, I'm doing the consulting thing and also selling courses, and now I'm doing like jiu-jitsu and pottery.

It feels very unfocused. Right. Speaker A: And, but most people don't have time for any of the things they want to do. And you somehow have time for all of these things and you're doing them in a competent enough way that implies some level of focus. Maybe you're context switching a decent amount, but when you're there, you're maximizing that time. Speaker B: Okay, so here's an analogy that I had in my 4th year of my math degree, where I somehow laid it out where I was taking 5 courses, but to me, each one I believe was the same math problem.

So I'm just doing eigenvalues in 5 different ways. Right. And then it just doesn't feel like 5 things, really. Mm. Right. It's almost like asking, like, if you went to an athlete, I was like, how do you do so many sports? Like, I see you play golf and then also basketball and run track. And like, well, I'm just an athlete. Like, like the boundary of the sport does not feel like the right boundary. Speaker A: And clearly some of the inputs work across domain. Speaker B: Yeah. So it's not actually, so like, yeah, in math there's this notion of effective degrees of freedom, right?

It's like there's degrees of freedom, but if you, some of them are limited, like actually you can express everything in fewer degrees, right? And it's like, well, when I was taking that course, it really felt like I was taking like 2.5 courses. Like it wasn't 5 courses. And so I think of when I do other things like, well, To you, it looks like I'm doing like 7 things. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: But like, what am I really doing? I'm trying to figure out what people want. And it turns out in any kind of business, that's like the only thing.

And then I'm also developing the skill of like writing an offer. So I'm only doing 2 things. I'm doing like lead generation and then writing offers. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: But like, what am I really doing? I'm trying to figure out what people want. And it turns out in any kind of business, that's like the only thing. And then I'm also developing the skill of like writing an offer. So I'm only doing 2 things. I'm doing like lead generation and then writing offers. Speaker A: What about including some of these more personal discipline things or creative things.

I don't— maybe you think— is jiu-jitsu and pottery, for example, the same problem? Speaker B: I think the principles are the same, which is just don't— just don't try fancy shit. Okay. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like, if you want to be effective, just stop trying fancy shit. Speaker A: Like, just simplify. Speaker B: Yeah. Like, just stop watching YouTube and just, like, do it. And then try to forget as much as possible. And then everything you remember is extremely effective. Speaker A: There's a guy named Visakan on Twitter. Speaker B: Yes.

You know him? Speaker A: He's got the whole thing about like, just draw the owl and like, just draw 100 owls. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: I just, I feel like so many things I learned when I was younger, I was like, oh man, like on YouTube, I saw this thing. Let me try this thing. Then you lose. Speaker A: We're looking for shortcuts. Maybe. Speaker B: Yeah, but it's like in jiu-jitsu, it's like, how do I get better at jiu-jitsu? It's like time on the mat. Every black belt has the same answer, time on the mat.

And then every beginner has like their own answer. Speaker A: We're looking for shortcuts. Maybe. Speaker B: Yeah, but it's like in jiu-jitsu, it's like, how do I get better at jiu-jitsu? It's like time on the mat. Every black belt has the same answer, time on the mat. And then every beginner has like their own answer. Speaker A: Do you think you're good at things you enjoy or enjoy the things you're good at? Speaker B: I definitely am good at the things I enjoy. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Like if I've gotten like, I've definitely nearly like failed courses.

I just like don't respect them. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: So I don't have proof that I could like push through anything. Speaker A: Yeah. But so there's clearly something there, which is that you chose jiu-jitsu and not X. Like the critical input to time on the mat is liking to be on the mat. It's, it's the Novak Djokovic. I like to hit the tennis ball. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: How do you, how do you, how do you decide what to— I don't know, there's 20, 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds named Jackson trying to figure out what they should, what they're great at or what they should do.

And some, maybe you just happened on jiu-jitsu and it like was, was right, but how do you decide what to try to get good at? If it Maybe the question isn't how do you get good at things? It's how do you decide what to get good at? Is that fair? Maybe I'm missing the point still. Speaker B: Hmm. I don't even know. I just feel like I just enjoy knowing I can be good at things. Hmm. So it's like the meta skill is like the true reward. Speaker B: Hmm. I don't even know.

I just feel like I just enjoy knowing I can be good at things. Hmm. So it's like the meta skill is like the true reward. Speaker A: Have you tried stuff that you were like, nah, not for me? Or coding, jiu-jitsu, freediving, and pottery. Speaker B: Maybe it's cope, but I just see it as like, I feel like I am unwilling to make the sacrifices to be good at this thing. Speaker A: So I'm not going to try, but the stuff I am willing to try, great. Yeah. Speaker B: So I guess, I guess maybe that's just an exchange rate for time.

Speaker A: Yeah. No, I actually think there's, there's a lot, there's, and there's some draw, there's some energy. I, one of my, one of my sort of working definitions of, of sort of like how you get to taste is like. I think it costs Rick Rubin less energy to like listen to the incremental amount of music than the rest of us. And so like, it's just like, he can just listen to more music. And so like, he's going to have better taste. Speaker B: He's more fit. Speaker A: It's, it's, there's another version of this, which is like, what's the thing that sort of like, Naval's version is like, what feels like play to you?

Speaker B: Does it work? Speaker A: The one I like even more is like, um, what's the thing that sort of seems hard for everyone else that doesn't seem that hard for you? Maybe that's an oversimplification, but there was something that drew you to the mat. And a lot of people look at jiu-jitsu and they're like, hell no. Like, oh my gosh. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that drew me, okay. I think that what draws me to many things is seeing that more knowledge is like an incredibly powerful force multiplier.

Like, because yeah, I think he was like, okay, the outcome is force times leverage, right? And there's like a whole range of things that you can do, but there are certain things that you can be thousands of times better at. Like, nobody is deadlifting like even 10x more than the average person, you know what I mean? Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that drew me, okay. I think that what draws me to many things is seeing that more knowledge is like an incredibly powerful force multiplier. Like, because yeah, I think he was like, okay, the outcome is force times leverage, right?

And there's like a whole range of things that you can do, but there are certain things that you can be thousands of times better at. Like, nobody is deadlifting like even 10x more than the average person, you know what I mean? Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Like, the average person does like maybe 130, and the best person does like 1,000. So, okay, so like world record maybe is like 10x. Speaker A: But like, the possibility space of expression is fairly limited. Speaker B: Yeah. Like between the average runner and the fastest runner, I don't know what that number is.

Speaker A: Okay. Speaker B: Right. But I think there are other activities where that lever is like thousands. Speaker A: Do you like chess or Go? Speaker B: No, but I definitely think they're more than 10 times better than me. Speaker A: Yeah, they could be nerd snipes in the future. Speaker B: I think they could. I think they're probably thousands of times better than me. Right. But yeah, so maybe a part of it is like those games are more interesting because those games are games where like determination and force and effort compound more dramatically.

Speaker A: I think you almost have to say they're more creative. I'm, again, I don't want to eliminate creativity, but on some dimension, like more possibility space. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Is kind of a good proxy for creativity. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. I would say so. I would say so. Yeah. Speaker A: Have you ever heard of a guy named Josh Waitzkin? Speaker B: I love his books. Speaker A: Yeah. You're very, very Josh. Speaker B: Making the unconscious conscious. Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and his whole thing is like sort of learning is self-expression.

Like it truly is like creativity through— you can play chess musically, you can play chess mathematically. Speaker B: Yeah, and I think like, you know, you get to a point where you can kind of tell who's who just by the work that they do. And it's all that moment is always like super fun. Like at least I want to get to that level where I can like listen to some, like I would love to get to a point where when I listen to music, I can like understand the person. Like I think I can barely do that in jiu-jitsu.

Like if I roll with somebody, I feel like I know them better. Speaker A: It's like a fingerprint almost. Speaker B: Yeah, but I'm not there with music. It just sounds good. Wow. Oh, I love this. I don't have the language yet. Speaker A: This is cool. Speaker B: Right. Like I can like read code and be like, oh, this person's like a little nervous and like doesn't think he's doing the right thing. And like, you know, he's like left some options in like how this is implemented. Speaker A: But you can see the person in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Cause I'm just like, oh yeah. Like I, like it's weird, but yeah, I feel like I can tell if code is like not as confident. Right. Has like committed to a decision that is like harder to step back out of. Right. Like my personality is like, oh, I want to build the dumbest thing possible. Like I want to make it super simple, very easy to like uninstall because I'm confident that you're not going to do it anyways. Right. Speaker A: But you can see the person in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Cause I'm just like, oh yeah. Like I, like it's weird, but yeah, I feel like I can tell if code is like not as confident. Right. Has like committed to a decision that is like harder to step back out of. Right. Like my personality is like, oh, I want to build the dumbest thing possible. Like I want to make it super simple, very easy to like uninstall because I'm confident that you're not going to do it anyways. Right. Speaker A: It's funny. There's, um, my intuition would be that most people, there are a lot of domains and software engineering being one of them that at least people without sophistication in them would assume are highly utilitarian.

And sort of like, um, there's a very correct way to write a certain type of text. There's a correct way to do the job. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: Yes. And obviously intuitively, I think more people get that they're in purely creative domains. There isn't a correct way. Pottery. And then competition is this really beautiful, interesting marriage of those two where like chess, maybe some people think there's a correct way. I think a great chess player would say, oh, actually no, they're— and so, but the funny thing is I think actually almost every domain is much more like pottery.

Than it is like math. And even math is— Speaker B: Yeah, many different. Okay, so here's the analogy I talk about when we talk about this subject, which is I mostly hate programmers because they try to express themselves too much. Right? Like, I think too many programmers act like painters and not like animators. Like, you cannot just show up in an animation studio and like do your thing. Everyone draws Homer Simpson like Homer Simpson. Like, if you add like an extra line in his head, you're doing it wrong. Speaker B: Yeah, many different.

Okay, so here's the analogy I talk about when we talk about this subject, which is I mostly hate programmers because they try to express themselves too much. Right? Like, I think too many programmers act like painters and not like animators. Like, you cannot just show up in an animation studio and like do your thing. Everyone draws Homer Simpson like Homer Simpson. Like, if you add like an extra line in his head, you're doing it wrong. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Right. And like animation, there's like levels of mentorship and review and like keyframing.

And the people who do the keyframes are different than the people who do the transitions. And some of that work is like overseen, all this stuff. Like that is a production. But I think most of software engineering feels like everyone gets to pick their own medium and everyone gets to pick their own frame and their own colors and their own style. And I think it's, I don't think it's good. Speaker A: The irony is that you're almost saying that, um, and maybe the point would be to be clear in both animation and in software, a really experienced person is going to see the fingerprints anyway.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: The irony is that you're almost saying that, um, and maybe the point would be to be clear in both animation and in software, a really experienced person is going to see the fingerprints anyway. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But there's also some degree to which you should fall in line with the style or the design language or the form. Speaker B: Yeah. And like, if you think about animation, you know, there are kinds of scenes that certain animators excel at. You know, like in anime, there's like, oh, if you see really good hand-to-hand combat, there's a couple of like big guys for that.

Mm-hmm. Right? Oh, these are the ones that are exceptionally good at like dynamic hand-to-hand combat with like wild camera angles. And they come in and they supervise the orchestration. Or it's like, you know, Gundams, lasers shooting out, like rocks exploding into like a million pieces. But there's like styles. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: But for the most part, like everyone kind of knows that there needs to be some kind of cohesion. I feel like in a lot of software there is no cohesion. Everyone wants to do it their way because there's this like demonstration of intelligence.

I think that annoys me. Speaker A: Well, and there's some degree, back to the shortcut thing. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: The person who should express the most style in theory should be the master. I was watching the studio, um, the, um, uh, Miyazaki documentary recently on, uh, making The Boy and the Heron. Have you seen this? Speaker A: Well, and there's some degree, back to the shortcut thing. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: The person who should express the most style in theory should be the master. I was watching the studio, um, the, um, uh, Miyazaki documentary recently on, uh, making The Boy and the Heron.

Have you seen this? Speaker B: No, no, no. Speaker A: It's amazing. Really, really great. Um, and they ended up bringing in the Neon Genesis guy to animate on Boy and the Heron because Miyazaki's aging. And it's this like beautiful version of what you're describing in the positive direction, which is like the Neon Genesis guy is a master who's showing up at the foot of the master of masters and is like, I'm going to fall in line. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: We don't have a lot of that culture in not just software engineering, but almost anything.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, yeah, maybe it's not even animation. Maybe it's just like, actually, no, I think even like Cinderella probably has like the, you know, fall in line. You're an animator. This is the role you play. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But yeah, I feel like a lot of the culture I see is just very wonky because of that, like personality. Speaker A: Well, I think this is broadly true. There's a meta point here around probably like Western culture and Eastern culture. One of the clear divides seems to be that the good, the good thing about Western culture is that we have way more creativity.

We have way more styles, but at some point you maybe rotate past the point of like, there's a reason mastery and training and apprenticeship and honing a craft over a really long period of time. Do you think we're losing that entirely in, in at least maybe the software domain? Speaker B: I don't think it's, I don't know how often that's actually here, right? Like everyone's talking about like the death of the junior developer and like, I don't want to hire junior people because why? Because the senior people don't want to mentor.

Yeah. They want to just do their job. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But they, and they don't think that mentorship is part of that job, right? Because if you're cracked, you're like a 14-year-old, like just coding since forever and you're like, well, Why did you need the mentor? But I think now because more people are entering the field, there's just like, yeah, very little interest in mentoring. Like the way I coach my developer Ivan, I like feel bad sometimes because I'm just like very like, I don't know how to mentor someone in code.

I only know how to do it in like in pottery and like, you know, jiu-jitsu. Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Maybe there's something about code that makes it a little less apprenticey. Speaker B: I think it is equally apprenticeship, but it's just like the style is different. I'm just like, oh, I'm gonna write this code. You're gonna watch me write it and I'm just gonna delete the code and you gotta reproduce it. And I feel like an asshole, you know what I mean? Speaker A: Well, maybe this is what software needs is like a different approach to— Yeah.

I mean, you obviously know so much more than I could possibly imagine on this front, but like, it's not even, even simply the notion of like, there's a whole bunch of senior developers at Facebook and there's a whole bunch of junior developers. That is not like, welcome to the sushi shop. Like I am the master. You are the apprentice. You're going to clean. Like the entire structural dynamic of that is less intimate. And so it would be interesting to imagine maybe it's just product of intimacy and one-to-one pairing. And obviously there's some of that in these bigger companies, but.

Speaker B: Yeah, but like when I do this style of mentorship, like I feel like an asshole. But I'm like trying it, right? I was like, okay, I wrote the code. I want you to add all the comments and then add paragraph descriptions explaining what's going on. I want you to, I want to read it and I want to figure out whether or not your summary of the code is actually correct. I want to know that you understand and you can read, right? Even if you think about the idea of copying, Right.

I think because code is so easy to copy, no one's actually copying. Like, we're just like, oh, here's an instrument, go play music, go listen to music and then play music. But no one's like doing covers. Speaker A: Totally. Totally. And by the way, you hear great musicians, John, there's a John Mayer quote I love about this. He's like, I tried to sound like so-and-so and it ended up sounding like me. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: There's the Grateful Dead is another. And that is the beautiful kind of formation of style.

It's like the Virgil Abloh 3% idea. It's related. Speaker B: But here's the thing, in code, no one's copying for study. Everyone's like, oh, Jason built it, I'm going to build it differently. Everyone wants to build it differently because if you build it differently, you're smart. Huh. Speaker A: That's a good explanation. Speaker B: But in piano, if you could play Mozart, you're a genius. Yes. Speaker A: Yes. What? Yeah. Do you think, how do you think, do you put much consideration into style? Speaker B: In code? Speaker A: That's a good explanation.

Speaker B: But in piano, if you could play Mozart, you're a genius. Yes. Speaker A: Yes. What? Yeah. Do you think, how do you think, do you put much consideration into style? Speaker B: In code? Speaker A: Any sense of anything you do. Personal style in terms of clothing, in terms of your work, in terms of your creativity. Does style happen passively or are you considerate about it? Style feels like an interesting cousin of taste, which is part of, taste has been discussed a lot lately. Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, clothing is also different than like many other styles because clothing is also about like external perception of you.

You have to think, what symbols am I choosing to use to express myself? That's how I think about style. Speaker A: But let's go back to the, maybe outside of the clothing example, style and code. It's kind of along the lines of what we've been discussing. Speaker B: People are like, oh, I want to do it this way and that way. And like, they're like choosing to— Speaker A: but I'll give you a different example. Personal design language in pottery, having sort of like a model of reality or a model of practice or model of form.

I make— when I do bowls, I do like a turned-out lip. Yeah, these types of things. Maybe, maybe I'm conflating multiple ideas here, but it seems that most talented creatives, especially as they move up the mastery curve, implicitly or explicitly express style and even sort of reinforce style. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. And I feel like I'm just like, I don't even know how to give an answer because I don't even think of pottery with like a style. Speaker A: No. Speaker B: Yeah, it's just like my hands just create like a certain shape and like the style is just like what my body is like effective at making.

Speaker A: Well, it goes back to the maybe the very beginning of our conversation. Speaker B: Yeah, the depth of the cup. Yeah, like the depth of the cup is just determined by like the shape of my hand. You know what I mean? Speaker A: Okay, so you see the poetics of code, but you view poetry is purely wrote. Speaker B: Well, like both jiu-jitsu and pottery, it's like, oh, everything is just downstream of like my body. You know, like if I reduce everything, I am just doing whatever my body is good at.

You know what I mean? I don't know how to describe it. It's like if you have a paintbrush, like the mark it makes is the mark a paintbrush makes. Maybe this is like, this is too like East Asian woo, but it's like, yeah, like, does the, like the pencil style is just the pencil. And like if you draw with pencils, like it, obviously there's like a different expression, like who's holding the pencil, but like there's no person, like I'm the pencil. Speaker A: Do you have a style in your writing?

Speaker B: My writing is just me talking. Like it's just— Speaker A: Are writing and talking the same thing? Speaker A: Do you have a style in your writing? Speaker B: My writing is just me talking. Like it's just— Speaker A: Are writing and talking the same thing? Speaker B: For me, yes. Because I can't write. Speaker A: So you primarily, you write a ton, both code, you don't write a ton of code, but you write some code and you write a ton of words. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: You also do a lot of talking and you use dictation to some degree and then also to some degree transcription via LLM or even transmutation via LLM to write.

Did you write much before the recent advent of LLMs? Speaker B: No, no. Okay. Because before then I was just the technical person and to like, I don't want to waste my time writing all this shit because I got work to do. But you talked. Speaker A: Yes. Do you edit much? Speaker B: No. Speaker A: So your experience of writing is almost one of telling another person what to do with clay. That's an extreme degree. Obviously it's not that. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: But I think all of my blogs— You translated.

Speaker B: Yeah. All of my blogs are monologues. Speaker A: Monologues into dictation and with ChatGPT or something like that, editing it or— Speaker B: Yeah, basically just add some headers. Speaker A: And how close to what was dictated do you think the end result is? Speaker B: My favorite work is the least touched up because it should just, even my text messages are speech-to-text. Right. Because everything I say, I don't really say off the cuff. It's almost like I've told this to enough people that when I deliver it, it's just the first go.

Speaker B: My favorite work is the least touched up because it should just, even my text messages are speech-to-text. Right. Because everything I say, I don't really say off the cuff. It's almost like I've told this to enough people that when I deliver it, it's just the first go. Speaker A: Yeah. Do you, what's the description you give? What's like the— Prompt. Not just the prompt, or prompt and/or is there any instructions? Speaker B: Use my words, add some headers, remove filler words. Speaker A: Do not change the meaning of any of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I try. Yeah. I get quite upset when I— Speaker A: Have you experimented at all with trying to push it in the other direction? Speaker B: It gets too like, hey, howdy, like, you know? Speaker A: Do you think in 3 years it will, you'll want it to do more with your words? When it's, assuming it's much more, assuming it's intelligent, it's a 200 IQ and not a 90 IQ, 90, 100 IQ. Speaker B: In which case I would rather just have the LLM interview me and write its own content.

Speaker A: Really? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Okay. Different question. Would you want to have a great copywriter or copy editor? Speaker B: It depends on what the objective is. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right. Is it to sell? Because if it's to sell, like, I don't need to exist. Speaker A: But if it's to say what you believe, you want it to be as authentic as possible. Speaker B: Yeah, and even if it's like me talking about my feelings, I would never want that to be modified in any way unless the LM was interviewing me in a way that drew more out of me.

But one would argue if I had an idea that I think this is true and I want more people to believe this, then there's some objective of persuasion. I would want the language model to augment my persuasion because that's what Right. Like, that's me getting— that's me asking for help. Speaker B: It depends on what the objective is. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Right. Is it to sell? Because if it's to sell, like, I don't need to exist. Speaker A: But if it's to say what you believe, you want it to be as authentic as possible.

Speaker B: Yeah, and even if it's like me talking about my feelings, I would never want that to be modified in any way unless the LM was interviewing me in a way that drew more out of me. But one would argue if I had an idea that I think this is true and I want more people to believe this, then there's some objective of persuasion. I would want the language model to augment my persuasion because that's what Right. Like, that's me getting— that's me asking for help. Speaker A: Right, right, right, right.

Do you think— you've written about writing on the internet. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: I think a lot of people view writing as like some kind of meaningful hurdle for any subset of reasons. Do you think that the, like, talking into the LLM is a path that more people should try? Maybe broader question would be like, how to writing it, you can write on the internet to sell, you can write on the internet to shout out a bad signal, you can write on the internet to think. A lot of people aren't doing it.

You've written that more people should write more. Where do you think the gap is in this? Speaker B: I mean, for me, writing is almost just improv because all I do is I just say it once. Like I don't really edit that much. So like, but between idea and blog post to being published on my website, it's about 40 minutes. Speaker B: I mean, for me, writing is almost just improv because all I do is I just say it once. Like I don't really edit that much. So like, but between idea and blog post to being published on my website, it's about 40 minutes.

Speaker A: It's amazing. Speaker B: I'm glued. And like, it's really like, my writing is like very aggressive. It's like, if I get out of the house, I want to talk about like this idea. I'll just like record a Loom video on my phone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, copy transcript paste with my prompt and I'll just like email it to myself. And then when I get home, I'll just post it. Speaker A: What percentage of those do you publish? The times you sort of do some version of that?

Speaker B: Probably everything. Speaker A: Oh my gosh. But there's something that's not adding up here, which is to say either you're just like a generational spoken orator. Most of us have too high of a bar. Speaker B: Most, I think, is for sure the bar. I am a nobody. If 4,000 people read my article, On average, nobody knows me. Speaker A: Say more. Speaker B: Like, it doesn't, this doesn't matter. Speaker A: We were, before we turned on the podcast, we were talking a little bit about sort of modern media climate.

The optimal strategy is just to flood. Most of us are very concerned. Trump, Rogan, these guys, they just talk a ton. Speaker A: We were, before we turned on the podcast, we were talking a little bit about sort of modern media climate. The optimal strategy is just to flood. Most of us are very concerned. Trump, Rogan, these guys, they just talk a ton. Speaker B: Was that intuitive? Speaker A: And this gets into the succeeding on Twitter stuff. Speaker B: It's just Matt time. Speaker A: It's just Matt time. Yeah.

But this time it has an audience. Speaker B: When I fight somebody, I have an audience. The person I'm fighting. Speaker A: You know what? There's something inside of this that at least I'm realizing for myself, which is that if I knew that 5 people were going to read my posts, I would publish way more. Speaker B: 5 people's a dinner. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: I tell that joke because there's some theoretical possibility of it being out there forever. To your point, no one's reading it, but I'm getting caught up in the— Speaker B: Yeah, because you think you're somebody.

Speaker A: I think I'm more important than I am. Speaker B: You think you're somebody and I'm a nobody. I am liberated by the nobody. Speaker A: It's amazing. What about for Twitter? Same thing? Speaker B: I tweet 45 times a day. Speaker A: Is writing on Twitter different than writing long form? You tweet 45? That's crazy. Speaker B: Check my stats. Speaker A: I probably tweet 45 times this year. Speaker B: I really committed to Twitter. I had like 200 tweets and 400 followers January of 2023. I'm at like 28,000.

Speaker A: How many tweets? Speaker B: 22,000. 1.7 million. Speaker A: Jeez. Speaker B: It's just 1.7 million. Speaker A: How many tweets? Speaker B: 22,000. 1.7 million. Speaker A: Jeez. Speaker B: It's just 1.7 million. Speaker A: Is writing for long form and writing for Twitter different? I mean, obviously some degree, but how is it different? Speaker B: I think it's the same. It's just more words. Speaker A: It is the same. That doesn't seem intuitive to me. So I'll give an example. I find myself ending up writing a number of the essays I publish or don't publish.

Speaker B: I think you also write quality though. I think the difference is most of my writing is like me just like getting beat up by somebody at the gym or like beating up a beginner. Most of my writing is like— Speaker A: I think you write plenty of quality, so that doesn't mean it's to be too exclusive. Speaker B: But it's because I like beat someone at the gym that day. Speaker A: And a lot of days you get beat up, but I didn't read those. Speaker B: Yeah. Why?

Because it didn't surface. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: If I texted you, I don't even, I was surprised I wrote 55 things. Right? I was like, what the fuck? Like 7 of them are like overlapping concepts. Like I should have just written one good one. Speaker A: But if I, but you were, you were getting, there's a creative idea I love a lot, which is you have to get like the gunk out first. Speaker B: Yeah. Every artist has 10,000 bad drawings. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: It's like Picasso just got them out when he was like 12.

Yeah, it's like you just, you just like don't matter. Like all the good stuff, like if it was actually good, it would get pumped up. Speaker A: But if I, but you were, you were getting, there's a creative idea I love a lot, which is you have to get like the gunk out first. Speaker B: Yeah. Every artist has 10,000 bad drawings. Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: It's like Picasso just got them out when he was like 12. Yeah, it's like you just, you just like don't matter.

Like all the good stuff, like if it was actually good, it would get pumped up. Speaker A: That's the rare thing about the modern world. That's the one, like as much as people complain about it, the stuff's kind of meritocratic. What in, even if they are kind of similar, what have you learned about what makes a good tweet? It's not just random. Speaker B: Oh man, I mean, I can go through like course material. I mean, so the first thing I— Speaker A: This is the next course. Speaker B: It's in the consulting course.

Yeah, the consulting course is first be famous. Step 2— Speaker A: Profit. Speaker B: No, step 2 is like change your mind about pricing. Okay. And then step 3 is like give them permission to pay you more money. But be famous is basically like, are you familiar with like the ADA? Copywriting framework? Speaker A: No. Speaker B: Attention, information, desire, action. Speaker A: Attention, information, desire, action. Speaker B: Right. So one idea I have, it's like if I'm on Twitter just for attention, you're like sick. Speaker A: A lot of people are.

Speaker B: It's like, yeah, but you can also date girls for attention and validation. You can go on dating apps. There's no difference. Speaker A: A lot of people are. Speaker B: It's like, yeah, but you can also date girls for attention and validation. You can go on dating apps. There's no difference. Speaker A: Yes. Speaker B: Right? But if you want to actually convince someone of something or drive an action, I think AIDA is just a beautiful formula. So attention, information, desire, action. So the attention just says have a strong hook that makes them stop scrolling.

Information is, interest is just, you present them the information that you're supposed to get after they stop scrolling. Speaker A: Something interesting. Speaker B: Yeah. And then desire, you just create some desire with the information you give them in order for them to take an action. And then the action in this case is whatever you are asking for, a follow, a like, a retweet. So that's one thing. Speaker A: What percentage of your tweets are you even, do you even have a call to action though? Speaker B: Well, now it's like everything 'cause I have an autoresponder.

Speaker A: Oh, so you're basically treating every tweet as a potential billboard if it hits that has a rollout underneath of. Speaker B: Yeah, and in my, it's like based on category, like it's a good machine. Like I have the assembly line now, but. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But it's just like, well, so before it's like, oh, do this in less lines, like in 5 lines of code. That's attention, right? It's like, oh, I built this system to do this so you don't have to do that. Speaker A: The first 2 kind of come as a, the attention and information is sort of like you're really trying to give people the information that's actually interesting, but a lot of times that isn't self-evident.

And so the attention is like a clever way to make that shine. Speaker A: The first 2 kind of come as a, the attention and information is sort of like you're really trying to give people the information that's actually interesting, but a lot of times that isn't self-evident. And so the attention is like a clever way to make that shine. Speaker B: Right. And the attention should foreshadow the value of having read the information and the reward for taking action. So if my tweet was, yep, this weekend I went with my friends in New York City and we had fried chicken, man, this fried chicken was really good.

You've lost me. And another thing I think about when writing this tweet is the TAM of the hook. So this weekend I, if that was the first couple of words, what's the TAM of that? Speaker A: Low. Your voice, right? Speaker B: It's like, yeah, like unless you're famous, like unless like, yeah. But if I just said best chicken in New York, boom, right? What's the tampon between I had the best chicken in New York versus if you want the best chicken in New York? Much bigger. But then you're like, man, I had the best chicken in New York this weekend with my friends.

We didn't know where to go and this place like opened up late. We went and it was amazing. Right. If you're in the city, you should definitely check this out. That's ADA. But this is very different than like, oh, I went with my friends this weekend and we didn't know. They've already— you've already lost them. Speaker A: Where do you get ideas? It's a hard— it's maybe the wrong question, but— Speaker B: Well, it's just the sawdust is like my consulting. Like I'm actually just answering people's questions all the time.

Speaker A: You have an engine built into your daily day-to-day. Speaker A: Where do you get ideas? It's a hard— it's maybe the wrong question, but— Speaker B: Well, it's just the sawdust is like my consulting. Like I'm actually just answering people's questions all the time. Speaker A: You have an engine built into your daily day-to-day. Speaker B: Like I work at the lumber— Speaker A: like I work Yeah, ideas don't come from sitting around thinking about ideas. Ideas come from like bashing your head into things. Yeah. Speaker B: And it's always like, even that I have systematized.

I have LLMs constantly mining my latest call transcripts for tweets and blog posts. Speaker A: No way. Yeah. Just give us the super basic how that works. Speaker B: So I use like a meeting notes app. And one of the prompts I have automated is like, "Find notable things I've said." And like summarize it in like— Speaker A: You need like a friend wearable that's just going around all day, every day. Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then I also have another one that writes proposals for blog outlines for me.

So every meeting. Speaker A: Every meeting. Speaker B: So every meeting I get like 3 tweet ideas. Speaker A: What tool do you use? Speaker B: CircleBack. CircleBack. Okay. Speaker A: So it's auto-transcribing, feeding it and all. You've got scripts running. Yeah. Speaker B: And it sends me like a Slack message of like, here's 3 tweets that could have come. Speaker A: Imagine if they gave Donald Trump this. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Speaker B: We'd all be be done for. But yes, I have a whole, I have a Slack channel called Content Mine and it's just like you had a meeting with this VP, he asked 2 questions and you said something where he laughed.

And guess what? That tweet hits. Speaker A: Is it actually pretty good? Like it works? Speaker B: That's like 3 tweets a day. That's like 10%. Really? So that's like 10%. Speaker A: I mean, I have like, and your bar back to the earlier point, your bar for a tweet is not that high. Speaker B: Yeah, the average tweet gets 1,000 readers. A good tweet gets like 200,000. Like, it doesn't matter. Speaker A: 1,000 readers. How many likes? You don't even care. You're just pure engagement. Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I would say so.

Like, the thing I really care about now is like newsletter growth. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: So it's like 30 a day for like 2 newsletters. Speaker A: It's amazing. Speaker B: But it's all the sawdust, right? Speaker A: It's like Can you just for the listeners, like explain the sawdust very, very concretely? Speaker B: I think, I don't know who had this idea, but basically like I think they like some lumberyard was like hired some consultants to figure out how to make the lumberyard more productive and more like capital effective.

And like the ultimate conclusion was we should somehow monetize the sawdust that comes out of these saws. And that created like another billion-dollar industry of like particle boards. And like mulch and then like firewood and all that kind of stuff. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And that was like just, just the sawdust. It's just the stuff that is the byproduct of the core business. And my core business now is actually consulting and working with big companies that have real problems and talking to their engineers and them asking me questions. Speaker A: Which is an amazing engine for all this stuff.

Exactly. And it feeds back. Right, right. Speaker B: And so it's like, like I've answered the same, and it's great because I answer the same 4 questions from 4 different VPs. I write a blog post and the 7th VP comes in. And they just said, you just wrote about something 6 months ago that I've been struggling with for 2 months. And I go, great, let me go pull out from my repository of like 50 blog posts and just inundate you with all the answers to questions you're probably gonna have. And they're gonna go, okay, well, I just started noticing this today and you wrote about this 6 months ago.

Like, how can we work with you? Speaker A: Which is an amazing engine for all this stuff. Exactly. And it feeds back. Right, right. Speaker B: And so it's like, like I've answered the same, and it's great because I answer the same 4 questions from 4 different VPs. I write a blog post and the 7th VP comes in. And they just said, you just wrote about something 6 months ago that I've been struggling with for 2 months. And I go, great, let me go pull out from my repository of like 50 blog posts and just inundate you with all the answers to questions you're probably gonna have.

And they're gonna go, okay, well, I just started noticing this today and you wrote about this 6 months ago. Like, how can we work with you? Speaker A: No doubt. No brainer. Okay. I have a couple more things before we wrap up. Number one, I need the ELI5 on RAG. Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Okay. Speaker A: For the dummies, not including me. Speaker B: Prompt engineering is like doing— Speaker A: This is one of your courses. You had a big course on RAG. Speaker B: Yeah, but RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation, right?

And so if anyone has used something like ChatGPT, if you paste in a blog post, you can start talking to ChatGPT about the blog post, right? That's almost like giving ChatGPT a cheat sheet that it can reference. But you might not be able to copy paste like a textbook. So then the question is, can you figure out where the answer to your questions might lie in this textbook? So this is more like having an open book test, right? So now the question is, can we, you talk to an AI and can the AI figure out what to look for and how to read what it sees, right?

You could do this by trying to find relevant books and putting the context, relevant chapters, relevant pages. What you're trying to do is just sort of give the AI enough information so you can answer your question correctly. But the mistake is people are all sort of worried about the LLM answering the question and no one's really been focused on how to do the search very well, right? Turns out, like, if you ripped out the table of contents and the page numbers, an open book test is way, way harder. But if you put some Post-it notes to help you organize things, it's way better.

If you had summaries of these textbooks would be way better. If you gave them the whole library, it's actually not easier too. And so much of the importance of solving this problem ends up becoming a search problem rather than just sort of like the questions and the answers you're writing down. Speaker A: What's the upper bound on the type of thing you would do RAG on? Meaning like based on that explanation alone, if I knew kind of nothing else, you could intuit that that's like what LLMs do about with all the information.

Yeah. Obviously that doesn't make sense. Like what is the sort of boundary of a textbook, a whole encyclopedia, all of Wikipedia? Speaker B: So a lot of it is two things, right? One, when you're done training these models, you train them at some timestamp. And so all news that happened afterwards is hard to recover, right? So that's one thing. If a sports game happened today, ChatGPT can't know the answer unless it is able to search something, right? The second thing is ChatGPT will know everything that's on the internet, but there's just a lot of stuff that's not on the internet, right?

So can I ask it questions about my diary? No. But if I gave it the ability to read my diary, then yes, right? And then lastly, just as a matter of trust, I want it to cite things. I want to be able to read the thing it's citing. And so if I give it the page and it gives me an answer, I can ask, okay, where did you read this? Where on the page? Show me. Can I verify that this is true? Speaker A: Adding fidelity to the hallucination problem. Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.

So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do a RAG. And a lot of companies, if you're a giant company with tons of Slack messages and documentation and and paperwork and contracts, you have to do something that allows the LLM to search because you can't put it all into memory. Speaker A: Adding fidelity to the hallucination problem. Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do a RAG. And a lot of companies, if you're a giant company with tons of Slack messages and documentation and and paperwork and contracts, you have to do something that allows the LLM to search because you can't put it all into memory.

Speaker A: How is this different from embedding? Speaker B: So embedding is just a way of searching, right? So you could be searching things by reading the chapter headers of a book and then putting everything in. Right. But what if the chapter is animals in the jungle, right? But then you ask like animals in the forest. If you just compared the words, like maybe you don't have a match, but maybe you wanted the match, in which case the embeddings give you a way of sort of matching things a little bit more softly.

Speaker A: I see, I see, I see. My last question/prompt is, You inspired in me, and it prompted a number of fun conversations both with us and with people I know. How do you feel about couches? Speaker B: I think couches are evil. I think they're obstructions to intimacy in any household. I think, you know, sitting on couches are like, make you sedentary. You like sit too long, you get tight, you know. I have so many thoughts about couches, but I guess another thing that I really hate about couches is that I'm looking at your living room now.

I'm not going to just like attack you, but please lay it out. When you create a couch, you kind of force an orientation of how people sit. So you limit the possible views you can have of your own home. Right. And so if you live in like a regular like living room, if you have a couch, it's just guaranteed to be pointed at a TV. Speaker A: As ours is. Speaker B: It's a giant TV. It's completely just monopolized how we do attention. Right. Speaker A: And I just find that like, yeah, our space is less flexible as a result.

It's less multipurpose. Speaker B: Yeah. Like I feel like if we sat on a couch, if we sat on the couch and tried to have a conversation, we would immediately be at the opposite ends of the couch because if we did not set the end of the couch, he'd be like, what the fuck? Speaker A: He's like, the real problem. Speaker B: Yeah, it'd be like, why are you so close to me? Yeah, but then it's like the couch is designed to face the TV, but now we're trying to talk to each other, so we're all kind of just like leaning crooked awkwardly, you know?

Speaker A: Okay, so what's— what are— if not couches are, um, even if they have problems, they are fairly ubiquitous. And what are the alternatives? Speaker B: So I feel like another thing that I don't like about the couch is that it makes the floor like a sacred space. It's like if people sit on the couch and you sit on the floor, there's like hierarchies and shit that I don't really like, you know? So most of my living rooms for the past like 7 years is just the floor with like beanbags and cushions and you can move the beanbags around.

It's never like crazy. You can put the beanbags in the, in the, uh, closet and just sit on the floor. You know, if there's 5 people or 10 people in the space, it's modular. You can all just like sit on the ground and like in a circle and nothing's weird because there actually is no TV or something forcing the view and your view is always in front of you. Speaker A: Is the root of this just the backrest? Is the Western obsession with the backrest? As someone who kind of has— Speaker B: Oh, interesting.

Speaker A: Is the root of this just the backrest? Is the Western obsession with the backrest? As someone who kind of has— Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Speaker A: Like back and posture issues, this is my biggest— Speaker B: I don't think it's the backrest. I want to hear the story. Speaker A: Well, like, I think, like, for example, floor— I have floor pillows here. Most people find floor pillows to not be that comfortable, in part because they don't, like, have the— they're not used to sitting in them. Speaker B: They don't have the strength.

Speaker A: Literally, I don't think they necessarily have the core strength. But also there's just like, whereas I think if you had a bunch of really plush beanbags or even like lawn chair style chairs, it might be more comfortable for people. Speaker B: So There was a study that was like, for the elderly, how well you can get off the ground. So if you were to like go supine. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: How quickly could you get off the ground? Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And it was like a very high predictor of just like overall deaths of falls and like, it's like a predictor of your lifespan after you're 50, right?

It's because people just don't— aren't used to like being close to the ground and like even carrying their own body weight on their hands. And like sitting is something that's like uncomfortable for them. Like they have to be enveloped in foam in order to sort of be able to carry their own weight. Speaker A: And then big couch. It's all big couch. Speaker B: I think it's big chair, really. Speaker A: Like a big chair. Yeah. Speaker B: I don't even like the chair. Speaker A: Wow. But you— do you put the couch as worse than the chair?

My intuition is the couch works better than the chair for a handful of reasons, mostly around size, rigidity, and the sort of facing each other problem. Speaker A: And then big couch. It's all big couch. Speaker B: I think it's big chair, really. Speaker A: Like a big chair. Yeah. Speaker B: I don't even like the chair. Speaker A: Wow. But you— do you put the couch as worse than the chair? My intuition is the couch works better than the chair for a handful of reasons, mostly around size, rigidity, and the sort of facing each other problem.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so, because I have chairs in my home, but the way I place chairs in my home is mostly to curate multiple views, which the couch limits. Yeah, like if— like there is a chair I ask my friends to sit in to read if I am like entertaining them in the kitchen. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Because they have a view of like the music from behind. But I'm in the kitchen, control the flow. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But there's a different chair I ask my friends to sit in when I work.

So you don't see me. Speaker A: It's considered. There's intention here. Speaker B: And it's like, oh, I'm going to do this like thing that is like, I'm not stressful, but just like separating. But I can like exclude myself from the view of that. Speaker A: I have a second about this, which is I think more so even than the posture in the backrest, I think to your earlier point, it might be the television. I think it's downstream of the television because when the television's there, the best way to watch a television is a couch against a wall that's facing the television.

And so when you, when you put the television in, you then put the couch in and the rest of the room is just dealing with these things. The other main thing, when you take away the couch, everyone says, oh, it's less comfortable to sit and watch the TV. Speaker B: Right. Because what I really want to be doing is just You know, staying in one place, not talking to each other, staring at a screen. Speaker B: Right. Because what I really want to be doing is just You know, staying in one place, not talking to each other, staring at a screen.

Speaker A: Maybe this— maybe the path to a couchless, to Tommy Matt kind of wonderful society is one where we all have like Vision Pros or something lighter. We have glasses and any wall or space. Speaker B: Right, right, right. Speaker A: Like that could be the solution. I hate to say— or we just be less addicted to screens, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. Speaker B: Yeah, I'd rather just be looking at each other. Speaker A: It's a beautiful thought to send us off with. Thank you. This is wonderful.

Speaker B: This is really fun. Speaker A: Do you have anything you want to, aside from the 25 things you're automatically selling on your Twitter feed and newsletters and courses, what is the thing you want to sell most? Most? Yeah. If you could only pick one. Speaker B: I'm not going to sell anything. I just want to say, you know, I feel like the thing I've been working with my coach this week was just that the open mouth is the one that gets fed. Wow. You gotta just ask, ask the world for what you want.

Speaker A: And the speaking mouth is the one that gets hurt. I think that's another— Speaker B: oh yes, the work does not speak for itself. Speaker A: I think a lot of people need to hear that. I read this all— the last thing I'll say is I read this amazing— my friend Blake shared this amazing, um, uh, interview with the Duolingo founder. Have you seen this? Speaker B: The engagement? Yes. Speaker A: And it's like, the question is, do you prefer engagement or education? Speaker B: It could— Speaker A: when, when there is a trade-off, and he's like, No question, it's engagement 1000% of the time.

You can't teach an empty seat. Speaker B: The engagement? Yes. Speaker A: And it's like, the question is, do you prefer engagement or education? Speaker B: It could— Speaker A: when, when there is a trade-off, and he's like, No question, it's engagement 1000% of the time. You can't teach an empty seat. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: The work doesn't speak for itself. Jason, my friend, this was great. See you soon.