5: Tina He - Internet Citizen and Philosopher in Action

Welcome to Dialectic. Tina He is a product designer, entrepreneur, and writer. She now leads developer tool products for Coinbase's network base, which she joined through acquisition of her company, Station Labs. Tina grew up in China and yet is one of the most American people I know. She calls New York home, but is even more so a citizen of the internet. Tina is also my favorite person to get reading recommendations from, especially philosophy. I aim to give listeners a glimpse of the types of wide-ranging conversations that I've enjoyed with Tina over the years. Enjoy. Here's Tina. I think this is my first non-professional podcast, actually. Like, it's my first podcast with a friend. How does that feel? Actually, I have had a podcast with a friend, but then it was about asking about my work and my startup. it's very, it's way easier when I knew that's the topic. Where for this, I didn't know it's going to be a Jackson philosophical. We have many places to go. Okay. All right. Well, here's where we will start. You are somebody who makes me think about identity more than almost anyone. And I think that applies in an individual sense and in a communal sense. And I want to start specifically with place, because I think place is something that you put a lot of thought and intention into. And I'll start with a quote that you included, I think, in your piece on belonging. And this is Olga, I'm going to totally butcher her name, Olga Tokareczek. Anyway. You say, no one has articulated the amorphous identity of locality better than Polish novelist Olga Tokareczek. She says, to someone from nowhere. Every movement turns into a return. And so I want to ask, what does it mean to be local or alocal? This is something that I personally think about out of necessity. And I think recently there are way more representation of people that are migrants as authors in recent publishing.

And we're seeing this narrative more and more. That's becoming more and more prevalent. And before, you know, reading kind of these writers, you know, many of them may be minorities, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, you know, they may be someone with my background, which is growing up from another country and coming to a new place. Everyone grapples with this identity of, you know. What am I? Right. Am I American? Am I Chinese? Am I Korean? That's like kind of the most fundamental level of nationality, which is a very literal kind of interpretation of who you are as a person. And I've had this experience, you know, so for some context, I came to America when I was 14 and I've been here for it's going to reveal my age for 14 years now. So. I think that I would consider myself an American. I went to high school here. I got a degree here. Most of my friends are American. I had a career here. And you would think that in my very little provincial view that I am as American as it gets with Chinese roots. But I was denied entry when kind of two years ago when I was reentering America with a different visa. And and the reason being that I work in high tech and given, you know, the broader context and cultural context, I fully understand. Right. Because of the recent more intense and intense U.S.-China relationship, you know, and this is beyond any individual's control that. Basically, every individual that's involved in the process now is being affected, especially those who work in high tech, is being held with higher scrutiny. But as an individual who kind of considered himself American, you kind of felt a moment of expulsion in that moment where you don't feel necessarily accepted by a country that you would consider home. So that was like a very distinct moment when, you know, something like identity really comes.

to my mind of okay like the nation that i will consider my home you know it's not accepting me um maybe on paper uh or or is questioning my intention of being here because you know you are being reduced to like a tech worker um in america who's a chinese national and then what is my identity um if that is not something that clearly defines me um and clearly giving me legitimacy, which is, you know, I love tech and this is a passion of mine. I didn't go into it knowing that I am a Chinese national that is going to potentially one day borrow some IPs from a nation from across the Pacific back to my home country. So my intention has always been so naive and to be honest, very pure. So I think that kind of, you know, makes me think I'm probably not the only. person that feel like this and many people probably are starting to ask you know what what what am i like what's actually my home and i think people nowadays can find that and how you and i have met was via the internet and via you know platforms like twitter when you're putting your raw thoughts online um being able to you know kind of in a more algorithmic sense um almost being re-identified by algorithm as almost like a liberating process of you know, kind of dissecting your identity into almost bits of information that's being reorganized by this algorithm. Redrawing it, cutting it up and recutting it and regrouping it by it. Right. So in some way, right, people argue that we're brainwashed by or, you know, being manipulated by the algorithm to, you know, be fed content that completely resonate with our echo chamber. And kind of limits our view. But to be honest, like, I think that argument is totally valid, given, you know, we are seeing that playing out with the polarized political environment and all that. But I think there's also something that's very beautiful and positive about that. I feel like without the algorithm, right, I would not have discovered you. I would not have discovered many people that are now close and dear to me. So to kind of tie everything back to your question about what does being local and what does locality mean? I think that, you know.

the most crude categorization. There's, you know, locality in the sense of, you know, physicality, like I'm present right now in New York, in this apartment, in East Village with you. You know, I'm local in the sense that I am from a certain country. I belong to a certain nationality. I have certain identity and culture that identify me as who I am. And then there's the local as kind of this spiritual or... I would say intellectual, but the intellectual kind of resolves also back to spiritual, which I think is something else that we should talk about. That ends up being, yeah, being something that I think most people are actually yearning for in this day and age. That's beyond kind of where you are physically. What an amazing first answer and covers so many places I want to go. We will certainly spend a lot of time talking about the Internet. But one of your other favorite places is, as you mentioned, New York City. I have another quote I want to read from Italo Calino that you've shared that I think is just amazing, but also maybe specifically kind of feels like your relationship with New York. There's two. He says, life in New York has started to become ferociously pleasant again. I must be daft, but I am more in love than ever with this horrendous city. New York is the only true love of my life. And then, and this really feels like you, the city which I have felt. was my own city more than any other is New York. I wanted New Yorker to be engraved on my tombstone. What does being a New Yorker mean to you? Yeah, being a New Yorker, I think really by the end of the day is liberation. You are not, it's almost like in New York, every day is a rebirth. I think when I talk to some of my friends who talk about city life being extremely lonely, I actually always respond. I love that. I love that every day you're able to wake up and feel extremely alone. Wow. And I think there's nowhere else than New York that makes you feel like that. And that actually, you know, creates a sense of community, ironically.

Where I think the fact that people in New York always, you know, kind of bond, regardless of where they go, is that they have experienced a sense of acute loneliness that they're able to appreciate, you know, moments of kind of understanding. And I think, you know, there's another kind of experience that I think about a lot is in. Basically, there's Jonathan Franzen is this very famous American author that writes about, you know, the suburban American life. And that was actually my first exposure to like one of the first exposure, I would say, to American literature when I was very young and read a lot of his stuff. And, you know, my and also Raymond Carver is another author that influenced me a lot in terms of my impression of America. And there's always a sense of like. you know, isolation, alienation, even when you're in a very secluded neighborhood in suburban life. And, you know, in those, basically, if you read any of those stories, a lot of their kind of protagonists or stories cover life in the suburbia in America, especially like upper middle class or middle class life, where everyone knows everybody else. And they're very concerned with, you know, kind of the bourgeois matters. And it's just suffocating the same way that, you know. It's honestly the reason why, you know, I wanted to leave, I think, you know, China and my family to kind of come here, I think is for that sense of liberation. And I think when I was especially when I was younger, I kind of put such a premium on breaking free from that, you know, kind of suffocating sense of community where you have to kind of, you know, be very sensitive or maybe. in any kind of secluded environment with people involved in it, you inevitably result in games. And those games are usually social games. And social games are not always the most productive to pursuing your intellectual or your other pursuits and for being different. And there's always that the cost of being an outcast is much higher. But in New York, it's kind of the problem is being flipped on its head where

Because, you know, there's no such idea of like, you know, a tight knit community besides the fact that, yeah, it is New York. There are these communities that you can choose to be a part of. But everyone, by the end of the day, is a true individual. And I think that there's something that's very beautiful and resonant in terms of being able to wake up every day, knowing that, you know, who I was yesterday no longer defines me and today. You know, I can kind of choose my own adventure all over again. And I think something about New York City also, I talk about this with one of our mutual friends a lot. Chris Peck also is very resonant of the Internet as well, where if you walk down, you know, Manhattan and you go through each neighborhood. Every neighborhood almost has its very distinct culture and heritage. And this might be a little bit cliche to say. Basically, you don't feel like there's any limitation in the diversity that you can you can be a part of. So there's also something that's amazing about, you know, if I'm feeling it almost feels like a college campus and it feels like Internet. Right. You're going into different departments, you know, using the college campus metaphor and using the Internet metaphor. You're going to like different Reddit threads or different forums. We're discovering all these emergence. And I think one thing that I observe about New Yorkers that I find very fascinating, especially old New Yorkers, is like, okay, like these newcomers, they're, you know, gentrifying and really sabotaging my neighborhood. And I find that so fascinating because, you know, that is literally what makes New York so great. It's because, you know, one day, you know, this culture might become obsolete and someone new is going to come and define what they think New York is. Yeah. Rebirth again. Birth again. So this constant birth and rebirth is, you know, very, I think, calming to my soul. I love the dichotomy between – it's interesting. I was reading a poem from David White recently on the word alone, and he talks very similarly to you about this sort of extreme dichotomy between how aloneness is actually also sort of the path to connection.

To your point, there's nothing more alone than sort of like being alone in an apartment in New York City, surrounded by everyone and yet alone. But also, as someone who's lived in other cities, and notably Los Angeles, like for me, Los Angeles is a city that is way more about your cluster. It's way less about individuals, but it doesn't have the interweaving fabric. Like, yeah, there's such a fascinating high and low of individualism and interweaving. connection in new york that yeah i think you nailed it do you you we've talked about other cities you love tokyo as well and you i think broadly have an interest in urban design um or or really what i would say is place design because as we'll get to extends into the internet what is so enamoring to you about cities or these places of connection and particularly thinking about designing them or at least being attuned to how they are designed or how they are grown. Totally. I think that maybe the answer is a little antithetical to my interest in urban design. Maybe my interest is more so how urban cities came or evolved into the way that they are or how they're being shaped versus how urban designers are capable of designing them. I'm not an urban designer. I simply, you know, have an interest in how cities evolve. So I'm not actually the expert here in urban design. But then there's this, you know, really interesting kind of dichotomy between schools of thought and urban design, you know, that's common in designing any products or any. any experiences that you know you and i may be familiar with especially on the internet right there is a very top-down way of designing cities which is you know a kind of state-owned programming and you have you know very planned cities and actually um some of the manhattan in manhattan specifically the grid system like you know midtown and the way that everything is so structured i think there's a little bit of centralized planning involved in that um and then there's obviously another school of thought which is like

almost fully emergent where streets kind of form and then you have different cultural centers the garden exactly Jane Jacobs um yeah like I think every New Yorker at this point probably has read Jane Jacobs so so don't want to be like over overly redundant here um but kind of that that was kind of the um central idea of of her work um which is around this perseverance of like the emergent pattern and how without overly maintaining them, you actually can have faith that as long as there is an ecosystem of feedback loops within those emergent pods, they will continue to thrive and there's going to be a community. So I think that maybe tying urban design back to maybe some of the... conversations about the internet. Something that I find very interesting around internet products specifically, which is also an area that I like to draw analogy when I'm thinking about topics like urban design is, you know, we kind of see also classes of internet platforms. They're internet platforms that, you know, even without a team actively maintaining them, you know, without very little capital investment, they can just last for a long time. And they, for example, if you kind of not to like diminish any of the work that have, you know, the teams at Twitter and out X and at Reddit and they're doing, and I think that there are kind of this more, there's a lot of interesting work that they're doing in terms of, you know, fostering the community. But at the same time, you know, let's just do a thought exercise in thinking that those people are all, you know, taken away. Like what would those platforms look like? My guess is that they will still exist, right? They might not, you know, they might lack some, interesting economic activities that are present. Like, for example, these platforms invest pretty heavily in moderation, in things like advertisement, which actually I think it's not necessarily always a negative thing. It could be positive in curating certain content and certain demographics within a platform. The platform now is heavily investing in things like community nodes and other products that make the content higher quality.

So those efforts are definitely recognized. But at the same time, right, just imagine a world without them. There's a Genesis story. There is the famous kind of critical line of Twitter, which is that it's a clown car in a gold mine. Yeah. But I think more honestly, whether it be Twitter or Reddit or talking about physical world places, a place like New York. Obviously, there's all the things you're talking about, the ongoing maintenance, the improvements. But there's also some sort of founding story or some founding DNA or culture or something that is. Self-fulfilling. Totally. And that's really fascinating. 100%. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And we don't necessarily have that many of those in a digital sense, although that's obviously something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe to just get to it and talk specifically about the internet, one of my favorite lines you've ever written, you say, it's even becoming much easier to find a weird hidden corner online than to find a physical place that truly feels like one's own. And I think that obviously describes your and my. experience of the internet as sort of people who maybe at a specific age got to see the world before a little bit and obviously grow up in a world of the internet. Before we talk super specifically about Station and your work, do you want to just talk a little about what writing online and making friends online, especially given what you said at the top and coming to the U.S. at 14, how that experience has been for you as someone who as much as you are a New Yorker, you are also a citizen of the internet. Totally. I would even maybe say I am like first and foremost a citizen of the Internet, even before I was a New Yorker. But definitely, I think New Yorker is as close as it gets right now, at least in this moment in time. So actually writing online is just because I was really bored. When did you first start writing that? I've read stuff going back to probably 2019 or 2020. 2018 is probably when I actually first started. I was still in college back then. And I also started working. And I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always knew that I wanted to build products. And that's always something that I grew up being passionate about is internet products. Like why they are the way they are. Like why are people like that on the internet? Like how does the internet kind of behave as such?

kind of magical ways to, you know, increase economic activities by such large scale for the world. I just feel like, you know, this is I don't have to be redundant here, but Internet truly is one of the most magical, I think, you know, human experiment and kind of an experiment of all time and a sociological experiment, economic experiment and all of that, all of the above. So. When I was in college, I started working. But as an international student, you know, I couldn't kind of didn't have the luxury, really. Maybe now people are more bold than what I used to be. But I didn't have a visa if I dropped out of college. And, you know, unless I just found a full-time role right away. And I think kind of the idea of dropping out also wasn't as prevalent in my time. But I kind of knew that, you know, I was kind of getting my diminishing marginal return in school. So I started writing. And I'm like. And most of my classmates just thought, you know, I'm always someone with just like all these weird ideas. And I write about like, you know, all the random stuff that I found on the Internet. And my college friends kind of gave me this nickname of a walking product hunt because I would like always show them and like, you know, sell them these like new Internet products that I found. I had a similar situation. 100 percent. So I wanted to share these passion with people. And I think back then. Is there ever any caution or fear about putting yourself out there? No. No. Yeah. I would say I have more fear now than I had before. I definitely had zero fear. You didn't know what you didn't know. Totally. I didn't know what I didn't know. And Internet wasn't as much of a dark forest back then. I feel like I think the idea of dark forest also, you know, was not as present to me. And now thinking back, actually, maybe to have a divergent thought, you know, kind of when Internet was very, very early in its early formation. And when I was a kid, it was definitely a dark forest. Can you explain what a dark forest is in this context? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for clarifying. So dark forest is this idea by this author, Chinese author, Zixing Liu, in his trilogy, Three Body Problem. And I won't spoil the book for you, but he did raise a theory, the theory of dark forest.

is essentially that in the universe, and just imagine the universe being this large cosmos that's beyond just Earth and our planetary system, you know, there's actually limited amount of energy that kind of, it's kind of like the axiom of like energy preservation, like there's limited amount of energy. And then as a civilization, if we need to survive, right, like you always want to kind of compete for more energy. And that is almost like a zero sum game. People can think about it not too dissimilar from the much smaller system of Earth. Eventually, at some point, you run out of resources, energy, especially as populations growing, technology growing, et cetera. A hundred percent. And and then information is a very valuable resources when, you know, energy is limited because, you know, information kind of. predates that how you're going to find those energy. So basically every action that you kind of perform in this universe, you know, is a bit of information that can be exploited by your competitor. So, you know, if you are a rational actor in this universe, you do not want to kind of reveal any information about yourself because the next thing that will happen to you is that your competitor or someone that's adversarial is going to exploit that information advantage and then basically destroy you. Just to make it super concrete for people, this is the sort of like remote tribe that's unknown sending out smoke signals. The colonist will probably see the smoke signals and colonists usually aren't that kind. Totally. Totally. But so obviously this applies in the sort of Fermi Paradox idea. Like, what does that mean in the context of the Internet and saying things on the Internet? Yeah. So saying things on the Internet, basically applying the Dark Forest theory in the book. Essentially, every time you kind of produce a bit of information on the Internet, just imagine that on the Internet, maybe what is that kind of energy as a currency that's kind of floating on the Internet? You can say that it's, you know, the most obvious answer, I think, is actually attention. Attention, zero sum. Everyone has limited amount of attention. And, you know, in order to get more attention, you.

want to basically produce content and information that will capture more information from your competitor. So if you, you know, were to produce a bit of information, you know, on the internet to compete for that very scarce resource that's called attention that you can expect. That someone adversarial is going to, you know, exploit that information of you looking to also exploit resources. Yes. That, you know, basically that would translate into something like maybe cancel culture where you say something on the Internet and then your adversary could cancel you. Or it could translate in the form of, you know, simply maybe just bad PR, you know, or, you know, someone might steal your idea. Many things could happen. I don't think you or I think. I mean, this gets to the question of fear. You and I are both people who I think probably don't believe the dark forest really extends to the internet, although maybe it's more in question than it used to be. The question ultimately becomes, like, is the upside worth the downside? And I think you and I have seen so much upside, but more and more, I don't know, it's an interesting tension. It's less obvious than, I'm much more inclined to believe Cixin Liu. in the context of the universe, like sending out messages seems like pretty risky. But in the context of the internet, I have seen so much reward and maybe I'm playing on the edge, but clearly you feel somewhat similarly. Totally. I think it becomes like fully intellectual conversation. I can see it both sides where maybe, you know, at some point, if you're a small, using the like Tsing Lu's like analogy, you're a small civilization that's sending out a signal. And maybe you will form alliances, you know, and we're experiencing where... You know, we're still small nodes on the Internet and, you know, everything we do, it's, you know, but obviously it's not the perfect analogy by all means. But if you think about it in a more adversarial way, then, yeah, maybe as, you know, kind of people start to see whatever alliance we form as a thread and, you know, they want to have attention captured, they want to have ideological capture on the Internet, then, you know, whatever we say online would be exploited. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. When we're doing this, you are someone who's written a lot online. You've written a lot less online the last couple of years. Granted, you've been busy. And we are currently doing a version of this. We're recording a conversation with a level of complexity here. And we're shouting it out. And like, would I want 10,000 people to hear it? Maybe. Do I want a billion people to hear it? Actually, maybe not. That's an interesting tension. Totally. A meta thought here is, you know, I'm actually when I'm just this is a meta observation of the conversation that we're having. applying the dark forest theory is without the dark forest theory being you know let's say be in action i would the thought of oh i was saying something about leaving china and like the china's u.s relations a meta thought came across my mind it's like oh what what was someone else said about that right and that thought would have not crossed my mind at all if the theory is not kind of you know Or maybe when you were 16 or at 18 or 20. Yes, that wouldn't have not crossed my mind. And that's just a very honest, raw kind of examination into the root of my brain and why that thought came up as the way that they did. Not that I'm like actually consciously worried or anything like that. But we, I mean, we, yeah. And this is something that, by the way, I think like people 10 years older than us and 10 years younger than us, also probably a different relationship too. Totally. the positive sides, and I think I feel similarly, like, you, maybe a question, like, how many of the most meaningful relationships in your life have you met online? Probably, like, 90%. Which, like, on the other end, it's like, oh my gosh, like, undeniably, Twitter alone, I think for me, probably for you too, like... Clearly that was worth the upside. Totally. And maybe, yeah, it's so fascinating the ways that you're constantly dealing with a new negotiation on that risk. The willingness, and to tie it back to when you started writing when you were younger, the willingness to take the risk, to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there, to do whatever it is, you are running one risk on the dark forest theory, but you're also spinning the serendipity wheel.

A hundred percent. This is like the bat signal idea of putting yourself out online. You and I are literally friends. You're the second person I've had on this podcast who I became friends with after reaching out, I think because of their writing. And what an amazing thing. It is truly a privilege. I would not have met my husband if I did not write online. So the dark, I think we have to, we have to say the dark forest theory for the internet, at least today is, is not quite, not quite there. What is, before we talk about. the more recent work, what has it felt like to actually become much more narrow in terms of what you're putting out online? You were writing weekly for fake pixels for almost three or four years, and you pulled back from that. How has that experience been like? Are you still meeting people online in the same way or less so? I think much less so. And that is something that I dearly miss. And I think that in life, there are chapters, I call them chapters of exploration and serendipity, where I'm like turning that wheel, like you mentioned, the serendipity wheel to the max. And, you know, I think that the past three, four years, just for context, I have been focused on building a company. And then there's like an acquisition that came about. it's really and i've come much much more rather than writing i kind of wish to another creative mode which is building software building product um i feel like i just kind of dialed up risk taking in a completely different way and um and i and i think that you know neither defines me i think it's like i think it's probably i am the combination of both and a lot of people you know that want me to write right say that you know why did you stop you should keep writing And vice versa, right? Some people think that I should be going back and keep building companies, et cetera. So I don't think one person can be reduced into just one or the other. And I think both are me. And I'm learning, to be quite honest. All things considered, I feel old now on the internet, given there are so many amazing young people doing crazy things. But granted, in a grander scale, things were still very young. And I have not experimented doing both.

At the same time where, you know, I'm writing and I'm building a company, you know. Very different modes. Totally. Very different modes. And one is much more operationally and honestly pragmatic minded. And the other is, you know, kind of completely exploratory. And yeah, both are exhilarating in their own ways. You, as we kind of alluded to a little bit. You've done a lot of writing. You studied comparative literature, as I remember in college. You now work at Coinbase. There's a through line there that's not necessarily obvious. Do you want to talk a little, and maybe specifically for, I think it's worth talking about Station as well, like you seem particularly interested in going back to the internet as a place, this idea of maybe labor markets and economies and the future of work. and the way that people could coordinate. And I think that's really interesting inroads to crypto and specifically why you're so interested in it. But do you want to talk maybe about how the path from the writer in college studying comparative literature who had an interest in entrepreneurship, there was a venture capital stop in the middle, and then you ended up building a company for three years thinking about how people coordinate online. Like, was that a smooth path from the outside looking in, from the outside looking out? I think the only person... That, you know, where this path makes sense is probably myself, where I'm the only one I can see the through line through it all. But I actually think that my interest is decently consistent throughout the years. even since college. College, I would say, is kind of a playground of intellectualism. I studied comparative literature on the one side, but I also like information science on the other side, which is kind of like applied computer science, I would say, in my school. So I did learn how to code and all that stuff in college. Not a total world sell despite the claims. Not a total world sell despite the claims, exactly. But I just loved, I don't know, I love designing products and I love why.

how to design technology, why they're being used. I know this since I started playing with computers. I actually started coding when I was even younger, when I was making games. But games is a completely different intention. It's about storytelling for me, not about how the code actually works. And I did not, to be quite honest, really care at all about languages, which insulted probably more pure programmer friends of mine. I think that probably speaks to one of the reasons I think you're effective in crypto as well, which is a cut across ideology that is a little bit more focused on something. In certain, my only observation would be the type of person who's very focused on programming language might also be very focused on box space or different things. It's interesting. Totally. I admire the kind of technical aspect and the very kind of, you know. technical aspects of crypto. And there's a lot of interesting things here that I think I'm curious about. But really what fascinates me with crypto is actually kind of the more behavioral part of it. I think crypto is kind of what human behaviors, you know, when unhinged, which is you can argue is like legal arbitrage or temporary legal arbitrage. When unhinged, like what they would do in this huge economic and political. Zero friction. Zero friction. Right. It's kind of what the ideal free market kind of like, you know, the high X vision of like, you know, what that could look like in practice. And it's deeply intellectually stimulating and fascinating. And it never sleeps. And we both know this where, you know, I remember when we met kind of. And shortly after we met, you know, we both kind of stumble into crypto. And I think the height of maybe 2021, I think everyone I remember back then who was in the space was like, you know, their eyes were bloodshot. It's like very critical to not sleep. And everyone's just up all nine 24-7 just because, yes, like there's obviously money to be made. And, you know, from people that are not familiar with crypto, I think that media has really done a, you know.

So injustice, both in a positive and negative way, right? I think it like over amplify the crypto's potential where, you know, for example, Web3, right, which I'm also complicit of, of like, you know, thinking about how we can invent the future of the internet. And I think crypto has the potential of doing that. And that's why I'm still working in it. But then I think that the kind of over reductionist of like, this is just internet, but like upgraded. Almost like, you know, an upgraded version of an iPhone, I think is hugely imprecise. And it's like over dramatize what the impact of technology could be. Yes. And the other side of that is obviously like, you know, the criticisms, which is, you know, crypto is all scam. It's all gambling without like actually diving into the mechanisms and the details of it all. So I will say that, you know, but that's the media business, right? You over amplify or you like, you know, kind of over criticize on certain issues and both of which have hurt crypto, I think, tremendously. And back to your point, it's very it's very flattering that you mentioned that and you kind of observe that I kind of approach crypto from that lens. And yeah, so. OK, back to the question of how did that career make sense? I think even when I was in venture capital and the reason why I actually was in venture capital was pretty simple. I graduated and I actually that was a great year for graduates. I think, you know, I was kind of feeling really great about myself. I was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, I was doing contract work, designing and building stuff for people. And I could make a living just, you know, go independent. I could join some companies that were going public then. um as as product um product hires but none of those products really excite me i just thought it was such a moment that i wanted to build my own thing at some point soon so um i got connected to a alumni um 2018 or 2019 he kind of taught me about what venture capital was and i was like that sounds like a really cool job you just talk to people with ideas every day and that's how he sold me he's like yeah you want to build a company you know

If you want to be a great chef, you need to go to Michelin restaurants and actually have good taste. Eat tons of good food, yes. Eat tons of good food or else you wouldn't know what it tastes like. And I think that there's a famous quote when I actually, you know, you might know this, that I had a short stint as also a product designer in training. And I think that's actually what I learned from my mentor in product design, where as a young designer, you would think that you have great taste. And then, but you have terrible abilities. So every day you just live in agony thinking that, you know, everything you do is shit. And then there's like, you know, you don't see the light of the day. And then really the entirety of your career is not to improve your taste. The entirety of your career is to improve your ability so that your abilities and your taste actually align. And I feel that so painfully. And I think that especially with a stint of venture capital, I think that ruined me in some ways where I met some of the most world-class founders and my taste in people. And I think. My ability to see what has worked and what has not, and especially having worked with some people that have such a rigorous thinking process, I think that that has really spoiled me in a way that now, even to this day, I have such a high standard for extremely crisp and clear thinking. And very few disciplines actually, you know, require that in some degree, because there are, you know, disciplines that actually, you know, if you're more loose and creative, you're able to succeed as well. Or if you're able to, you know, kind of find your own principle in something, like you're able to operate well. But I do believe that in any discipline, in order to kind of play and operate at the highest level, you need that level of clarity of thinking. People are kind of far and few in between. And I think many of them kind of concentrate in, obviously, founders because they kind of have to out of necessity to have a thesis and then to be able to kind of orient such a group of people around them to execute on that thesis. And I think that has been just very eye opening to me, I think, as just a young person that's like trying to figure out what they want to do in the world.

But kind of intellectually, the parallel. And by the way, such rich interests and tastes. Back to the alignment, which I think Ira Glass is actually at least the first place I was exposed to that. So interesting. And then he's talking about artists. And yet I think it generalizes across everything, which is that the more you are enamored with things and the more you like the harder it is to say, oh, I got to consolidate, by the way. And like, and I'm not good enough at this yet. And yeah, it's yeah. Totally. Totally. I think we just went on like a. completely different. That's okay. That's okay. Yeah. So you, you, you landed in venture, you got to eat at a bunch of amazing restaurants for a while, but then you left. And by the way, you were at a place called Pace Capital with some amazing people. I think like very few people would leave that comfortable, great, intellectually interesting thing. Why did you leave? And why did you start station? Yeah. I, the, the very honest answer is, I do think that there's a part of me that, you know, is very analytical and kind of more rational as a human. But I think the other part of that is like hugely irrational and kind of almost follow my intuition by a fault, to a fault. And when I was at PACE, I started, you know, being enamored by crypto and by all the kind of topics that we discussed. And actually, you mentioned previously, you know, my interest in economic activities and potentially crypto's ability to change that labor markets coordination. Those are all true. And for those of you that may be unfamiliar with crypto, there was this thing that was happening in crypto around 2000. 20 and 21. And that was really kind of the moment when really a lot of things connected for me. I've always known crypto's potential and I've always admired the Bitcoin white paper, like many in the space of the elegant mechanism design. And I see its future of being this alternative asset platform that's completely programmatic, that is completely trustless, permissionless, basically all those words.

It may mean nothing, but really what it means is the absence of a middleman, the absence of an institution that's required to make arbitrary or necessary laws to ensure that value flow. And just to make it even more explicit, I think the thing you spent so much of your career on and you've written so well about too is specifically the way that crypto is a tool to make the internet a place that is more rich for all of us. Yes. More than anyone I know, you remind me most of myself in what drew you to crypto, which is actually that like person who grew up on the Internet and like, oh, we could fix that. We can make this place better for ourselves, which I think is really. And maybe some of that, that that through line can get lost in these words, especially for people who are less sophisticated on it. The words around openness and permission, like what really they're like. How do we make New York better? Yeah, totally. How do we make New York better? It's the citizenship of the Internet, like you said. So it is about that. And as you go kind of deeper into it, around 2020, 2021, there was this thing called DAO, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, that started to emerge. And really, there are kind of these... You know, they're like flash mobs. It's almost like, you know, you go around New York and suddenly you see like a group of people that are aggregated. When I was kind of on my way here to your apartment, I saw like a group of Santa people in Santa cloth clothing. They're just, you know, in a circle. I don't know what they're doing, but they're aggregated for a purpose. So you're kind of seeing that happening on the Internet where they're gathered together. And most of them are, you know, have animated profile pictures. You don't know what their names are. But what you know is that they have a shared bank account. And that bank account is not actually a bank account. It's an account that's basically a cryptographic wallet that stores assets in it. And then you look at, you know, it's like, oh, like these anime avatar, what could they be doing together? And you look at the wallet address and it's like, OK, it's, you know, $50 million. You're just like, wow, that's a lot of money being run by this group of kind of cyber funks, right? Like these group of independent minded people that are trying to build something together.

And, you know, I dive into some of these communities, you know, Maker, Yearn, some of these kind of top projects back then. And you look at how they're operated. They have these things called government proposals, you know, which are things that you only see kind of in forums or games when we grew up. You know, every forum, there's like a mod that has like so much political power. Take it way too seriously. Take it super seriously and have these like improvement proposals. And if you were to debate about them, it's like it's like that all over again, but with like actual money and, you know, actual assets on the table. And, you know, you can't help but feel like, yeah, like this intuitively just makes sense. Right. Without being too sophisticated about it. Right. And obviously we kind of like the more you learn about finance and like its history, the more you kind of like start to kind of understand. Right. Like how all these rules and laws are being being put in place. But at the same time, you know, I think that over the course of human history, there's so much brokenness in that system as we know it. And then there's so much inefficiency that is incurred from that complexity. And, you know, if crypto were to do one thing, which is just to simplify that, right? And that doesn't mean that it should be unregulated. It should be just completely free. But then if it's an opportunity for us to just like take a step back, you know, as a maybe as humanity to be like, you know, are we designing our financial system? Are we designing the way that value or economic activities are performed, you know, in the way that's, you know, most fair, most open, you know, most conducive to productivity and growth and all the good stuff. Especially in a new form, which is this digital space. Totally. Where we have it. There's there's one thing. There's one quote that you referenced that I really like, especially in the way that it. frames why starting with economic systems is actually so important for cultural things. From Alain Berteau, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, Order Without Design, you use this as an anchor that I just think is, come back to it several times. He says, excuse me, a well-functioning labor market brings together people with varied but complementary knowledge and skills, the preconditions for innovation. A well-functioning labor market makes possible every other urban attraction.

symphonic orchestra, museums, art galleries, public libraries, well-designed public spaces, and great restaurants, among many others. And the way that this is a frame for what, because again, I think part of the crypto stuff is people get really, people have a complicated relationship with money and with economic systems. And yet, so many of the other things we care so deeply about, and you more than almost anyone I know, deeply care about culture. And so it's fascinating, but also resonant in this quote. That someone who cares so deeply about our culture is actually working on economic systems, specifically through the Internet. Totally. And you nailed that. And I think that that's kind of the conclusion, right? You don't build them as museums and then the economic activities start to happen. It's just kind of the economic reality where economic systems and financial systems, by the end of the day, you know, are just allocation mechanisms and distribution mechanisms. There are ways to basically, you know, your like axiom of capitalism is you vote for your money. And, yeah, and like basically, you know, you kind of the kind of sacred job of an investor, maybe we're giving them too much credit, but a sacred job of an investor is to curate in some ways, like what, you know, what the next generation of infrastructure, what the next generation of culture, what the next generation of art will look like. Do you want to just very, we talked around a little bit, do you want to talk a little more concretely about Station, the journey? the mission, and then now being acquired by Coinbase and joining Coinbase, how you think about the work you're doing today and why it matters? Yeah, I think that it's very interesting now. I'm working at Base, at Coinbase, and, you know, Base's mission now is we're building a global on-chain economy, right, to increase creativity, innovation, and freedom. And those are all the things that we literally just talked about. So from a mission alignment perspective, definitely. There's a lot of that even very obvious from the first time I've talked to the team there. But in regards to Station, I think Station had this very ambitious mission of like, you should be able to do meaningful work no matter where you are and who you are. And that's, again, you know, from a very personal place of, you know, wanting to be recognized for who I am and not be identified necessarily by kind of the...

you know, real world constraints, but really by my ideas and by my contributions online. And those are the things that are tangible to me because, yeah. Cutting it up and rearranging it. Totally, cutting up and rearranging it. And, you know, if none of the words that I put out there on the internet, not ether, right, those are all impendible assets that I own, are invaluable, then I honestly, my life isn't real in many ways because so much of the relationship and the work that I do reside in those. cyber spaces. Right. And real is a really interesting word in this case. Totally. Right. And you kind of had that content dissonance when I was forming the company. Right. Like needing to sign and kind of do the actual paperwork and all the realness kind of that involves in that. And not that I was completely ignorant of the process of forming a company or running the company. But I think what really was stark was, you know, we are kind of painting this picture. you know, of wanting to bring as many things into the digital world, being digital native as possible because it's, you know, way more efficient and, you know, because it's problematic. I think there are also ways that things are just more productive and I think economically made more sense. You know, why should I need to set up different banking entities and, you know, having to file all these paperboards, hire a lawyer that's deep, like super expensive for the company at that stage when my, you know, some of our investors just send USDC over. And it costs them nothing. Or if I'm an employee, like, why do I need to have a W-2 and only be able to work for one company at a time? So much of this stuff could be redrawn. Totally. So much of that can be rejoined. And I wanted to, like, rebuild all of that. Right. And I think that's kind of the first time founder ambition. And to be honest, I think that that idea is still there. And what literally was station in kind of its most pragmatic form? Just for people who are, if they're a little confused. Yeah, we wanted to build a smart contract platform that essentially, if you want to be able to have a wallet to receive funds, if you want to kind of create some arbitrary rules where, you know, you want recurring payments to another wallet, you know, or if you want like a smart contract, we basically expose them through a set of APIs and SDKs.

So the intention of building these modular contract system is so that, you know, our hypothesis is that if we arm people with the tools, they're able to basically modularize and kind of use them as Lego blocks and build kind of the company or the organizational structure of their dreams. Right. So it's all these sort of like payroll, like we think about online payroll, like Gusto and Passports and Identity, like basically saying, what if we... allowed people to build these in an internet native way versus something that was just like purely adopted from how payroll used to work, but now it's digitized. And by the way, I could have, I could work for four companies. Yep. I'm an online contributor. 100%. So our customers were, you know, all kind of, some of them call themselves DAOs, which are just like, you know, emergent organizations that need a bank account and move funds around to pay their contributors. Yep. You know, some of them are GitHub repos, you know, that want to also pay their contributors. And we realized that most of what they needed, yes, they need the tech infrastructure, which, you know, we also provided them. It's also the legal, like kind of we call them IRL compatibility issues. So they need, you know, a company like accompanying paperwork and legal and reconnection to the quote unquote real, real world, the reconnection to the real world. Exactly. And then there's another aspect, which is like kind of the marketplace aspect, which is like really what, you know, we build all these tools that to want to get there, which is a network. You know, how can we actually enable all the people? They're leveraging our tools in the future to discover one another, you know, so that, you know, we kind of admire companies like Canva or Figma or Notion where they're kind of creating a new class of jobs where there's like Notion creators or Figma template creators. They're talking about new labor markets. New labor markets. Exactly. So we kind of hypothesize that there's going to be a new labor market of people that want to be paid in crypto and they want to also set up entity in a particular way. that look completely different from how LLCs and C-Corp are being formed in the past. And, you know, with that type of liquidity of both kind of the supply side and the demand side, like there can be a huge network that are built. And I think that a lot of the hypotheses are still being played out today with the work that I'm doing at Coinbase and Base. And the reason why this kind of collaboration started to make sense to us and to me is that, like, we kind of grew.

our tool side of things. Basically, that looks very much like a glorified SaaS business, right? You know, to a certain scale, actually. I mean, we got some large customers. And then, you know, we kind of were doing the math in our head. It's like, okay, but we're a venture-backed company. We need to grow to a certain scale. And, you know, at that point of the journey, you know, we kind of realized that in order to grow to a scale, you know, we have to basically become a network. um you know like the base or like some of the ethereum networks now and yeah rather than kind of doing that from scratch like what would that look like continue the chapter um at a place where they already have some traction and liquidity but now i think that my estimation of timeline back when i started station was around maybe three to five years but not i don't know i think that with you know Some of the kind of revival of traction with this new administration and whatnot. Yeah, it could take shorter than I expected, but I do think it's going to take much longer. But I hope that in the in the substantive mechanical elements. But yet, if you just look at it as a tailwind or directional flow, like the future is going to be one of Internet citizens. Yeah. doing work with people across the world in all different kinds of communications that we never imagined before. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things that can be grounding and energizing despite the, like, very ebb and flow, real-time, present, high, low. Totally. So I totally agree with that. And I think it's going to happen in my lifetime, regardless, and I want to be a part of that. So that's still something that deeply captured my attention. And one thing that actually threw me off the... kind of maybe surprised me the most is actually the development, like it surprised everybody, right? It's actually the development of agents and AI and how sophisticated they are becoming in the labor market. So that's another kind of new actor that we're considering in this game, almost this new iteration. A new member of the labor force. New member of the labor force. And actually those players, I think, require maybe crypto even more than humans because it's just digitally native. Yeah, what's real?

Okay. Chaining gears a little bit, but ties into the work. You are a serious person. I don't think that that can be said about that many people. And what I mean by that, I'm alluding a little bit to this essay from a guy named Visekan Viraswamy who wrote an essay called Are You Serious? that I think about a lot. But what I mean is that you take your work seriously, you take yourself seriously, you take your ideas seriously, you take your life seriously. That doesn't necessarily mean you're not fun or joyful or funny, but you... Again, you have an earnestness with which you do the things that you do and you're not really hedging. Is that intrinsic? Is that something you've improved on? Is that based on competence and success? Do you know no other way? What a question, Jackson. Let me meditate on that. I think from a very young age. I've always known that I really, I want to be a creator. Like I want to be a creative. I want to, I think, but the form and the medium of that, right? I think there are some people that maybe from a young age knew that like they want to be a writer or a painter or pianist or whatnot. I just always know that I will be working in, you know. the creative field like be it building technology or writing books or something of that nature i know that i will be around with ideas or the above or the above um i just always know that i like i want to do that um and i think that really what hurts me the most is like mediocre work and i think really that um and i think that really is maybe to pay respect to people that are actually great And I think that there is this quote from Simone Weil, which is, attention is the purest form of prayer. And I think about that almost every day. And especially, you know, in our day and age of attention economy, where we're being always being monetized, you know, our attention is always being monetized by something. And drawn in 14 directions. And drawn in 14 directions, exactly.

When you've been blessed by, you know, someone's great work and you know that that great work comes from maybe their entire soul and you can just feel it in someone's writing, in the game or in the piece of music. I feel like once you've been touched by something like that once, you kind of feel like anything not that is almost sacrilegious. That feels very resonant for you in particular. Yeah. So, yeah, so I think that I'm still in the phase. We kind of talked about the idea of your craft and your ability not matching to your taste and vision. I think I'm very far from that and I'm being tormented by that every day. And that's probably like where that seriousness come from, where I actually just feel deeply inadequate in many ways. And not to say that in like a lack of confidence, right? I think it's actually just a very objective. And you're never going to get to that. It's always going to be a moving target. It's always going to be a moving target, probably. I think about, like, the Hokusai waves. I don't know if you've already talked about this. He's like, he basically is, like, 75. He's like, everything I did before this was total garbage. And now I'm starting to maybe get good. It's actually a very painful thought. I think I battle with this very deeply, I think, in the past two years. I didn't really share with that many people about this. kind of moment where I was deeply obsessed with this book called When We Cease to Understand the World. And many of our mutual friends are equally share that obsession with the book. It's a book by Benjamin Labatute. And, you know, he's a Chilean writer. And then he is very obsessed with this idea of basically obsessive individuals that are possessed, literally possessed by an idea. beyond their control and many of the kind of he writes in this very creative style of kind of creative historical fiction or maybe it's like maybe historical creative fiction in whatever order but basically he writes in a way that as if you know those characters are all based on real historical characters many of them are Nobel Prize winners in physics and mathematics.

um and literature actually but but then like he kind of made up some of the experiences that these people maybe may have had and we kind of can't tell as readers what is real and what is not because they're kind of bordering on this line of real and fake yes and i think that is his genius where you know again back to questions of real what do we what is the word yeah what is the word real mean and kind of tying that back and i think that some of these people um all suffer from kind of pretty severe, I would say, mental illness, kind of, if you kind of consider it in real world standards, because they're, you know, they kind of, via the kind of possession of the idea, I think many of them see the world as this very dark, like, kind of meaningless, nihilistic place. So one example is kind of the discovery of quantum physics, kind of this kind of quantum, pun unintended, quantum leap from mechanical physics. Where, you know, rather than all the results being deterministic, now you have these endless possibilities, you know, that are all kind of simultaneously true at the same time. In the very small, simple sense. Totally. That's, yes, exactly. And how that kind of maybe invalidate most of the science or progress that has made, you know, by humanity throughout. In short, reading that book is both a mind blowing experience for me, you know, as an admirer of Lepitude's craft. But it's also a deeply unsettling book on just a sense of if you become you're some type of obsessive person, I think your ends are always very tragic. And I meditate on that a lot. And to be honest, I really try and I think I take pride in being a decently joyful person. I love joy and I like. kind of a baseline level of peace and joy. And I think that's what enables great work. And I think life is short and you want to like be able to enjoy it. But at the same time, you know, I think I'm definitely very prone to being possessed by ideas and to an extent of obsession. And actually my investors has given me this feedback where I will write these company updates just like any startups would to the investor.

And then, you know, they're pretty simple and there's like metrics and whatnot. But then they catch up with me in person and I would just like give them an essay about how I've been thinking about the space. And they're like, are you OK? You know, these are very interesting thoughts. Like, do you think about publishing them? And I was like, I really never thought about publishing them. And I really think maybe I should and I should be more vocal about these things. But maybe the kind of feedback there is, you know, I've constantly gotten the feedback that I keep so much in my own head. To an extent that maybe it's like unproductive at some point where I externalize maybe like a fraction of what really lives in my head. And that can lead to pretty sometimes bad outcome. So the kind of the maybe the seriousness kind of come from, you know, this kind of obsessiveness. Probably sitting in this tension. Totally that tension. Well, you led right into where I want to go because I'd like to talk more about that edge on one side. and I think this ties into maybe getting out of your head and pragmatism too, you published something the day after the election that was part reflections, but also part sort of like, not quite a manifesto, but very emboldening. And the theme of it to me was a bit about individualism, but specifically around greatness in contrast maybe to goodness. And there's one line in particular that is incredible. You say, can I make monuments if I'm bold enough to put my bare hands in scorching steel? Can I be great? Not on the premise of anything at all, but simply that I want to. There's a line from John Collison where he says, all of everything around you was created by probably by one or a small group of people who were emboldened to do something great. The world is a museum of passion projects. this obviously there's an element of this being maybe the place where seriousness meets reality and ambition a yearning again beyond just living a good life and goodness and joy and comfort but to to maybe drift into that possessed zone yeah i think to be honest i don't have anything good to follow up on that i think i think that's truly a um

manifestation of how i felt at the moment and actually i wrote that i think a lot of people i wrote as a journal it's literally a journal entry and i said it as a journal but i think no one believed that it's almost like people it's like very similar back to the dark forest theory i think people just actually think i like thought about it or there is something you know you're trying to make some point about some point about political and it's it's like to be honest it's really not about politics at all i think it really was about maybe a vibe shift which is you know i think a lot of people are writing about that now where i think i felt it maybe around the time approaching election where you kind of start to see people that you would not have expected to come together Let's just use Elon Trump as like an example. And this is like, again, not a moral or like an ethical evaluation of that coalition. But just from a pure observation perspective, it is someone that, you know, has been a president before and, you know, is doing it again at the age of 78, you know, and someone that like basically breaking conventions and someone that like obviously is the richest man in the world. that's the least interesting fact about him it's someone that you know has you know hedge not hedge again like yeah not hedge his beds ever and then kind of went all in many many times over it's kind of a two crazy people right they're coming together um and beyond that right and other other kind of members of that administration i think they all have very interesting stories on their own um and that type of coalition of you know something that you know I think greatness is very reductionist as a word because greatness can take many forms. But it is this maybe bravery of maybe going against what is considered normal and what is considered expected. Right. You have a line in that in your journal about the notion that it didn't feel like America was yearning for greatness much more and was starting to become something more like Europe. I think the other thing as someone who has been very critical of Trump.

And broadly, I think some of this political stuff, the thing that was so powerful to me mostly about what you wrote was the combination. One, it was a distinctly American journal from a person who I find to be distinctly American and yet obviously has a complicated history around that, around identity and these things. And the way you just talked about greatness and also freedom and liberty and ambition and this disability. I mean, you say it in the line like the. The desire to be great for its own sake, which is, I think, a very American and not very anything else idea in a way, which is really powerful. Totally. You brought up Labitude. You got ahead of me. You recommended this book to me, When We Cease to Understand the World. I think it's one of our favorite books. And especially in this context, and we've already danced around this dichotomy so much already, but in this context of... You and I are two people who are very pro-progress and technology and ambition and greatness. The ending of that book is interesting in contrast. And I wanted to read the last paragraph, let's say, of the book. He says, it is a strange sight to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in an animal species. And he's talking about citrus trees. the ways that citrus trees die in a very unique way. Unlike most trees or even animals, they die from abundance. He says, but trees are very different organisms and such displays of over-ripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species with its uncontrolled devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But really, who would want to do that? obviously a talented writer. This is a book to, to the possession point. You, I don't know. I find that almost anything about obsession, you got, you got some of this almost that you go watch whiplash or the last dance or any of these. On one hand, I'm someone who finds the obsession. There's the line in whiplash from JK Simmons to the drummer. He says like the worst two words in the English language are good job. Like the worst thing I could possibly do is let the next Charlie Parker go. Not.

Not let him be great because he wasn't pushed enough. And yet, on the other hand, this book, Labitude, talks about the utter chaos and, frankly, like mental collapse of people who are possessed. And yet inside this maybe is seriousness. Totally. Yeah. How do you hold all this tension? It's, yeah. I think once you embrace it, I think it's less tension. It becomes the way you just. like kind of are and i think there's always going to be tension um but that tension is more so a observation about how maybe that state of existence is not what is expected of a i don't know normal individual and um but then as i think when you i believe all these people that are actually the living embodiment you know of these possessed or the obsessive people, they do not think about themselves being possessed or obsessive. And I actually do think that I'm the most, I think, happy and fulfilled, maybe not happy. I'm the most fulfilled when I am deeply possessed about something. And I do not think about totally. And I don't, it's not a choice. And I don't think about the meta of like, why am I so possessed? Like, you know, what is wrong with me? But I think one is still taken by such. kind of obsession or mission or whatever that is that they're just so laser focused on that staying on latitude for a second i think the other thing i really admire about you and you talked a bit about this is you're someone who's quite both grounded in reality and action and building and creating and yet also like loves ideas and words and philosophy uh and reconciling the two of these is not always an obvious thing or they're not necessarily harmonious especially when it comes to sort of like seeking truth or what's real, maybe back to this idea of realness. And I think when we cease to understand the world is a book about like horizons and what's past maybe the horizon of our ability to map truth or real or understanding, whether it be the source trials radius or quantum mechanics and the sort of like blanket that draws Einstein's like right in the book, Einstein like cannot manage to.

stomach, this notion that quantum mechanics doesn't follow an intuitive lens, God does not play dice for the universe. There's a couple of lines in the main novella around Heisenberg that I think embody this. One is, the physicist, like the poet, should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections. And then on Einstein, the father of relativity was a great master of visualization. All of his ideas about space and time had been born of this capacity to imagine himself in the most extreme physical circumstances. For this reason, he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both of his eyes in order to see further. And then finally, physics ought not to concern itself with reality, but rather with what we can say about reality. Maybe the last thing I'll give you here is you've written about... the enchanting and the disenchanting in the way i think specifically around science and religion the mystical and and and as someone who again is so like you're spending your day job today and for the last four years built very pragmatically like trudging through the mud of trying to build a new mechanical economic system for the world and yet you live in the world of kirkegaard yeah it's it's it's i think to be honest they're more related i think she's insane People, but maybe, but maybe there's more of us out there. I'm not sure because I think that it's not something that maybe outside of very close friend like yourself, I actually don't know how many of my friends, let's say, or people that I know at work know about my Kierkegaard or my philosophical side and vice versa, maybe. And I think that many of my maybe more ideas minded friends like yourself, maybe. may find me like a very different person a distinct person at work um not to say that you know one is not authentic to the other but but definitely i try to you know have a little bit of separation between the two realms just because you know one i think the philosophical side is about interpreting or seeing realities like plural um and

The doer and operator side is about, like, defining reality, singular. And that is a very empowering idea because, you know, I think the ideas and kind of the – like, what is the point of philosophy? And I think, you know, Wiengenstein has kind of – or maybe Kierkegaard and Wiengenstein has, like, two different completely school of thought. And, you know, Kierkegaard, the kind of father of existentialism, I think for him, you know. The whole point of philosophy is to learn how to live, actually, and how to be oneself. And for him, like the most moral thing. To find this reality in a sense. Totally. To find a reality, to kind of find your own reality. Like you are the most moral when you are kind of the most authentic and when you are the most faithful to God. And to him, like it sounds like a very Christian idea. But to him, actually, you know, the kind of central idea that he raised is that, you know, why does Abraham kill Isaac? um when it's literally his son and no father will kill his own son and it kind of violates all kind of rational principles because god told him so and god can be anything god can be his own dream which actually was the case in the bible right it was um you know god can be maybe a tree it can be you know in any form um or or a prophet or anything um as long as he believes in this thing that you know something believe in something and that relationship with that belief is completely abraham's it's it's his own is his subjective belief that he's able to commit such act and of course in the bible he was able to get isaac back and i think that's very symbolic and and definitely metaphorical where you know you you know any any act of irrationality in many ways is actually a subjective relationship of you and your belief and if you actually believe in it and you will get whatever you know, you think that you're sacrificing back even more, which, you know, for Abraham's case, like he's basically, you know, proven his faith to God, which is maybe worth even more than Isaac in that particular case. And versus, you know, Wincenstein spent his entire life wanting to build a mathematical model.

Because, you know, he is the student of Bertrand Russell, who's kind of this mathematician and definitely the defining philosopher that's kind of we're able to define like logic as almost a discipline in philosophy and Wittgenstein's ambition as a young student. And he's definitely the obsessive type that literally just would not even touch anybody. And, you know, women, men alike to devote himself to wanting to model the world. And I think that many young intellectual types that I've encountered and maybe myself included and maybe when I was also younger, I had this like maybe hubristic, you know, like an impulse to want to model the world. It's like I want to have a universal theory of everything. And this is going to help me, you know, build out the world. Yeah, I'll act after I've sufficiently modeled all reality. Totally. I will act after I've sufficiently modeled the reality. And then the irony here is. You know, there's, again, like we talk about realities and realities, plural, and reality is that when you act, right, when you act on that subjective instinct, you know, of whatever you believe in, like that becomes actually a reality. And that actually connects with a lot of the quantum theories as well, where there's all these parallel possibilities. But when your attention, you know, is kind of the kind of very classic quantum graph of like those two lines forming when you have, you kind of paid attention to it. And that becomes real. I think those ideas are connected where if that's your faith, right, that that's what you believe in and that's directionally what you want, like that's the reality you can manifest and you can create for yourself via your actions. And many existential philosophers also have similar ideas where, you know, kind of actions are kind of how you make decisions and your actions actually are your essence. Like there's no such thing as like intrinsic essence of a person and your actions kind of start to define your identity. But but kind of going back to Winkenstein, I think Winkenstein's approach is very similar to kind of a more scientific approach to understanding the world. And maybe and Winkenstein actually became like hyper religious, like in like the later part of his life. And after Tractatus, which is his first book, that's attempting to kind of model the world. He wrote the second book, Philosophical Investigations, which is actually like basically invalidating all the things that he wrote in his first book about anything he's done.

And then, you know, he actually became deeply religious in his later life. But just kind of using those two philosophers kind of as examples of two different ways of operating. I think that in especially, you know, working in startups, you have to be very, very comfortable with the fact that there are parallel universes that exist in front of you. And to be quite honest, it is true, right? Like whatever you tell the investor is just one possible iteration of that truth. But very likely, most early stage founders, they just have this kind of vague intuition and maybe a thesis, right? An observation about a market. And none of that is real yet. They don't have employees. They don't have anything. They don't have an office. It's kind of a deck and an idea. And then like as you kind of build out the company into the stages, it becomes kind of more and more of a constructed reality and a model of the world. And that model could be. Right. Or could be wrong completely of how that model fits into reality. But I would say that the founders that are the strongest are the ones that can be consistent around however they want to subjectively see the world and actually have coherent actions aligned with that pretty ridiculous vision. And if you think about Mars and why we need to go to Mars, it's actually, you know, there's so much kind of rational, analytical lens to look at why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. You know, it's kind of a propellant of maybe renewable energy is a propellant for us to figure out, you know, different ways to innovate on, you know, material science across the board. There's so many innovations are required for us to go to Mars. That's just good for humanity. Probably not good. But the actual intention of going to Mars is pretty ridiculous. It's like, why do we need to do that? And it is his like very dedicated belief. Even he kind of. articulated that in a very kind of almost analytical sense i think when you ask elon why he wants to go to mars he would say that you know we need humanity to have redundancy right like we need to have you know humans need um our future generations need to have a place to live um when when earth become inhabitable and that's probably scientific there's some scientific backing towards it but i think most of it is actually just elon's this elon's god yes yes right and then his action is just strictly pointing towards sides

And that's something I reflect on deeply every single day, where I think that the biggest gap between maybe, you know, myself as an entrepreneur and Elon as an entrepreneur, right? Elon definitely is, you know, very, very talented, very smart. And I don't deny that. But I also think that many people are very talented and very smart. But, you know, in terms of the strength of the faith and the strength of you believe as much as he did, I don't think I believe as much as he did. Right. And that's the thing that makes him unique. Totally. Yes. Yeah, there's something so powerful in what you said too around the, I almost relate to like the reality distortion field idea as the person who's sort of like, there's an extension of like the not believing anything is intrinsic and just believing that if you look, your attention makes reality. And if you truly embody that, it would enable you to act in a radical way. Yeah. In a radically uninhibited way. Yeah. Wow. Are there... About philosophy broadly, one of my favorite things you have on your website is this list of inspiring names, and a bunch of them are philosophers and writers. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Byung-Chul Han, Goethe, I'm mispronouncing, Kemu, Nishi, Wittgenstein, Carver, Ted Chiang, Murakami, Hermann Hesse is... This is smattering of interest. Is there is it too much of a reach to try to draw a through line across what might be other patterns across that list of names I mentioned? I think. Yeah, I probably have also some entrepreneurs on there, too. Yeah, that's just the philosopher's writer. I feel like the list of all the people on that, all of you on that list, I would say, are. People that have a very strong. coherence in their attention and in their style. And you cannot, that's not something, to be honest, you can just learn. It's almost like a way of living. Is that belief? Is it too much of a reach to say that's strong belief? Yes, I would say belief, but yeah, I think belief is...

In the kind of Kierkegaard sense you were describing. Totally, in the Kierkegaard sense. I think it's a strong belief combined with an obsession with their craft. Or else that belief would not be manifested. A seriousness. Totally, a seriousness that that wouldn't be manifested. Are there reasons – maybe a two-part question. Are there reasons – Byung-Chul Han's modern, obviously, Ted Chiang, Murakami, there's a few modern writers. Is there a reason there are more modern philosophers and maybe even – writers in this vintage type that have inspired you? And in a related way, are there things you've learned from studying so much writing and thinking from one to 200 years ago about what's changed about people and what hasn't changed? Definitely. I think that people really don't change that much, to be quite honest. I think that our modalities change dramatically. And that's what's interesting is it kind of shows you modalities are pretty human made. And, you know, whoever has the conviction that this is the modality, this is going to be. What do you mean by modality? Modality means, you know, medium, maybe another way to say it essentially is. You know, humans always communicate. It's like, how do we communicate? And the medium shapes us more than we realize. But the human, the human, McLuhan was right, but also the old philosophy works because we don't, we haven't changed. We haven't changed. And the way that, you know, the we manifest our basic desires, you know, the seven vices. Why haven't we found philosophers in new modalities? Why don't, what, is it a silly question to imagine what the Kierkegaard of our time would be or who it might be? And if so, if not. Yeah, I'd be curious for both sides of that. Like, maybe it just takes time for things to get lindy, and Kierkegaard on TikTok seems, like, less likely. But it also doesn't seem like we have much of a loss. Even Jung-Tol Han, at least as I understand, is, like, pretty rare in terms of a philosopher like this who's writing pretty short books and kind of using the Internet and writing about the Internet. Like, we don't have a lot of those. Yeah. Is there a reason for that? I just feel like those people are probably just rare in general.

And, you know, how many Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are there, like, in history, right? And there's probably only a few that— But do we have more people writing today and more accessibilities of the writing of the world? Yeah. That's true. But again, it could be a modality, which is that people aren't reading. Yeah. People aren't reading. I also feel like philosophy— Yeah, I think that maybe people are like I'm not like, you know, purist in any sense where like philosophy has to be these like really long, dense text that has to be read in a certain way or you have to learn them in a certain way. I definitely don't think that's true. And I think there are great philosophers online on Twitter. Right. That we call them like aren't your philosophers or whatever. Right. Like, you know, I believe many people think he's a philosopher. And in many ways he is because what is philosophy? Philosophy is just like a coherent way of seeing the world and it's a framework of seeing the world. And I think he presented one that ended up influencing the lives of many people. And I think, you know, venture capital actually is playing a big role in, you know, at least in our industry on philosophy, right? Like I think that potentially maybe Rick Rubin is. a philosopher in some way in his respective field. I'm just thinking about some very contemporary and maybe popular writers that are not necessarily being known for necessarily just... We don't call it the same thing. Totally. We don't call it the same thing, but they're known for kind of abstract ideas. It's funny. This makes me think of... I should digress and say there's no one who, at least in recent years, has better... like tickled my brain with their recommendations for me. And I thank you very much for that. Um, whether that be when we cease to understand the world or to, to, to talk about this, this next point, um, non things by young Phil Han. There's a, there's a, uh, probably the excerpt from that book, non things that I think about most that maybe ties into this. Where, where are the modern philosophers? He says, um, this is a little bit of a longer one, but I think it's relevant is he says anything time consuming is on the way out. Truth is time consuming.

Where bits of information come in quick succession, we have no time for truth. In our post-factual culture of excitement, communication is dominated by affects and emotions as opposed to rationality. These are temporarily unstable. They thus destabilize life. Trust, promises, and responsibility are also time-consuming practices. They stretch out from the present far into the future. Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding, and commitment are time-consuming practices. Lingering is another time consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information. And yet you are someone who, at least as far as I can tell, makes more time to linger. on big ideas, on philosophy, to go back and read these things that nobody else reads. How do you do it? What draws you to these things and lights you up and keeps you in the world of Kierkegaard when the rest of us are sort of like dazzled with the spray of a million lights of Twitter and Instagram and everything else? Or how do you find it? I think that finding them is a process of if you start picking one book up and then you kind of see a whole tree and how they're formed. It's like Nietzsche is the disciple of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was impacted by someone else. And you kind of see the lineage of how the entire intellectual tree came about, I think, for many students of the Internet. You can also see, you know, how different ideas came about, you know, like, for example, Biden was actually completely inspired by Google. Like the founders weren't even, you know, didn't even know what they wanted to build. They just knew that China needed a modern tech company that is fostering innovation like Google. And they structure a lot of things like Google. And, you know, they kind of figure it out that their products later on. And that's the rest of the history, the rest of the story.

But going back to your question, I think that I can actually do much better. I don't think I'm completely immune to that. And I think, you know, part of the challenge of our modern kind of mode of existence is that as someone whose profession is to be online, and I will say that most of the knowledge workers are, and in order to be competitive online, you do need to... say interesting things or build interesting products. And then in order to live in the now and live in the now, and then to promote those products, you need to be on Twitter. And actually, I think my Twitter these days actually have become much less philosophical and a lot more about just kind of sharing, sharing the products that I'm working on, which I'm very proud to share because that's also part of my work, but it's definitely not like, you know, some, some revelation from like a three hour meditation session. This is the realities in the reality though. You put that so perfectly well, and it is maybe one interpretation of the first thing you started to say was like, by having this backdrop, doing the work, one, it's easier to do the work for it when you start to fill in the picture and you have some touch. Oh, I actually can relate Kierkegaard to Niji or whatever. And then also, by the way, it can free you up to, at times, go off with this backdrop of philosophy. And go be very in your very specific reality, do things. And that that ebb and flow is maybe the optimal. But I think a lot of us are just riding on the edge of like consuming the now and not necessarily asserting too much reality or refining too much reality. Yeah, I think the analogy here is like. apartment like i'm in this apartment of yours right now and this is like the living room right the living room is like where you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about things reading and like maybe on the internet or whatnot and like this is where you kind of build your own context and i would say that this room is probably very jackson and there's a room and then you like enter that room and then that room is like maybe where you sleep or maybe there's a study you know in that room is where you do your reading and i think that's kind of like how

you know maybe as a human i kind of wish that my room and my home that like intellectual home can be just really rich and like truly my own um and it's like a place that hopefully is sacred and i think that you know my my career my work which i take tremendously serious and it's like a huge part of who i am um and there are those through lines you know in this main room of mine that you know i kind of maybe decorate or, yeah, and there's like definitely elements of that. But then like inside of that room of work, then I like try to, you know, borrow, I can bring books from the living room back in my room, right? Like I can, it's still truly mine, but it is a different space where I can do my work. And it allows you to between the contacts. Yeah, there's this idea from this guy, Billy Oppenheimer, where he talks about environmental priming and this, I think it's from Jerry Seinfeld. It's like, I know what we do here. Like James Cameron having two desks for while he was working on Terminator and Alien or something at the same time. He literally had a separate desk for each project. Obviously, much micro sense, the metaphor you're drawing. But I think what a beautiful metaphor. One of the last things I want to talk about is your interest in beauty and art and aesthetics. Along with all those amazing writers and philosophers on your website, you also have a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs. And then you also have filmmakers and artists and writers and fashion designers. I have a guest question. You mentioned him already, but I asked a dear friend of ours, Chris Peck, what I should ask you. And he, of course, thought for about 20 seconds and gave me this. How do you process the synergy between your aesthetic tastes and your business and intellectual tastes? Wow. That's a very Chris Peck question. I think that those three, like he kind of grouped them very interestingly. First of all, he grouped them into aesthetic taste and then business and intellectual. I believe so. I could be misremembered, but it may have been. Yeah, maybe. But let me just interpret it. Or maybe across all three. Totally across all three.

Because I think that business and intellectual to me are also distinctive. Right. And it would be interesting if for him they're the same. Right. That's like – I'm kind of thinking more so like why that would be the case for him, which – I'll cut in and say that, frankly, I almost think I relate to business and intellectual tastes more similar. To me, there's something else with particularly beauty. You can obviously get – I can get – read my letterbox i can get quite intellectual about my movie reviews but there's something different when i watch portrait of the lady on fire totally that is not about words yeah and so maybe it's possible at least that would be my yeah yeah totally and no i don't think that's a very interesting one i think even intellectually and business wise i have slightly different tastes obviously the three are all like venn diagrams with lots of overlaps right and um And I will say both in business and in intellectual pursuits. Intellectual maybe less so, but especially in business, actually, I think business and aesthetics to me are quite intersecting. That's why, you know, every product that are successful invest in design and invest in the first impression. And no matter how great your idea is, if, you know, the experience, the user experience is not great, right? People really just would not care about it. It's about feel. It's about feel. It's about feel, especially when you want to build a product at scale, even if you're building a developer product. What does beauty in software mean? Simplicity. Actually, maybe that's just beauty in many things. Self-evidence. Yeah, self-evidence. I think it's simplicity and coherent. Simplicity is more evident. And coherence is like, you know, there is something beautiful about going to a noodle shop and knowing what you're going to get. And that's, you know, going back to the idea of taste and attention, right? Like if you are paying attention and you are being authentic to yourself, there's a coherent through line of everything you do. And when you go to a nice restaurant that you really love, it's usually because, you know, maybe it's reflective of the owner.

It's reflective of something that's quirky about the neighborhood or something like that. And there's something so beautiful and authentic about that coherence. So I think those two are also true in software, especially for engineers, right? They want to know, you know, if you have input X and then given certain, you know, operations, what is going to come out on the other side. And they want to expect that outcome to be consistent over time. And they want the coherence of this, like. kind of the different product lines to all, you know, have same expected behavior. And it's nothing is more irritating than something behaving kind of. Yeah. Having affordance. There's the Steve Jobs line about how great objects should explain themselves, which I think is like the best definition of an affordance like I could ever imagine. Totally. Totally. So I would say that aesthetics and business actually have a lot more overlap because maybe going back to answering the question more succinctly, aesthetic taste is a lot more about your body. It's about how you as a human and a biological object react to your environment. And I actually think that modern art, actually, I think there's a lot of critique of modern art that talks about how the over-intellectualization of modern art, where, you know, when you look at an art, you have to hold a reference of, you know, many decades of work behind you. It's like, oh, this, like, you know, come before it. And if you didn't understand that artist, you would not understand this artist and what they're referring to. And, you know. And that kind of like circular reference makes appreciating just simple beauty very difficult, you know. And when you see maybe a beautiful painting of a flower, my mother actually, you know, is recently picked up this new hobby as a painter. And I recently discovered she's insanely talented. She painted these like beautiful flowers. And, you know, I was just, you know, astounded. that's just really beautiful art and you know she didn't have an art degree like she actually does not know any references right um at all to like maybe the high art world um but she just creates what she thinks is beautiful and it is actually just beautiful and it's pretty simple um and i think that any intellectual you know kind of boundary pushing which i always appreciate right of you know maybe some you know fashion or art they're trying to push boundary you know of

you know, some construct, right? Like early Celine, like Phoebe Philo, I think for a long time, like her construction of clothing, it's like very architectural, like, you know, using bold colors. Those are the things that are very new concepts to fashion, especially women's fashion back then. So she is pushing modality, but by the end of the day, like the colors are harmonious. It's not like very, you know, all those things follow some natural principle and your body kind of react very positively towards that. So that's like basically the short answer. I think aesthetic, you know, needs to, Yeah. How does that, you have a bunch of fashion designers, Virgil, Yoji, Phoebe, Karl Lagerfeld, and you have a bunch of filmmakers. Is there, fashion especially makes it like you, one of the most important things with clothing is actually to be able to go feel it on your body or touch it. Does it still, does that still extend into film? Yes, definitely. And we both are film consumers. And actually I remember the scene. Specifically, you mentioned the portrait of Billy on Fire, which is a fantastic film. And then the other one that comes to mind that's like very similar in nature is actually Blue is the Warmest Color. Never seen it. You've never seen it. But there's one scene where it's about two female lovers. This is Lea Seydoux? Yeah, Lea Seydoux. Two female lovers that fell in love for the first time. But it's, you know, it's about this kind of lesbian couples. but it really applies to everyone. There's a scene where they're under the sun, lying on the grass, and then they're like just falling in love. And then one of them is just looking at the other and like the little baby blonde hair that's being reflected under the sun. And it's, you know, it's like that one scene. And you know that whenever you like have a crush on someone, you kind of notice the smallest thing about them. And then like every small body parts becomes, you know, just so. really important to you and so beautiful to you and i think they capture those moments extremely well so i think there's also that universality in you know how our sensual processes you know react to certain environments and emotions and the best filmmakers recognize that yeah i think the week i watched portrait of a lady i also watched in the mood for love oh yeah and it's a movie that's not intellectual it's purely this view yeah the other thing uh there's

It's a little silly, but one of my favorite definitions of art comes from Shia LaBeouf, where he says that anything that moves you is art. He was asked, Armin's art, and he says, yes, anything that moves you is art. And I think that might be another articulation of the theory. What role does love play in your life? And specifically as it relates to people, to work and creativity, to ambition, to greatness, to beauty. I think love and faith and attention and everything we talked about are very interconnected. And I don't think there is a more sacred saying or more genuine expression of love than paying attention to something. And by paying attention, I mean like paying attention, not just, you know, we're looking at each other at dinner and I'm scrolling on my phone. I think even at this moment, I think my love for you as a friend is captured by me spending two hours here, not thinking about anything else on the Saturday afternoon with you and talking about this. And I'm deeply grateful for this. I mean, attention is all we have. And it's not, in a world of abundance, one of the only things that's scarce. Totally. I experience you as someone who is... deeply loving in all that you are, and I think that's an amazing articulation of it. The last thing I have for you is just something that reminds me of you, and I think it maybe is an especially compelling frame for the tension between modeling realities and choosing a reality. It's from the first thing I ever read of yours. You quoted Jeff Bezos' Princeton commencement speech, and I'd like to read it back to you. Oh, God. It makes me think of you. He says tomorrow in a very real sense, your life, the life you author from scratch on your own begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you're wrong or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it's tough, will you give up or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others or will you be kind? When you are 80 years old and in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling... That will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. It's been wonderful to be with you. I'm deeply flattered.