1: Jason Liu - The Freedom in Being Nobody

Hey, I'm Jackson Dahl, and I'm excited to share episode one of a new interview podcast, Dialectic. We'll have conversations with the sharpest, most creative, and original people I know, or want to know, and it will be wide-ranging, probably covering the stuff I care about most, ideas, ambition, tech, startups, business, art, culture, philosophy, taste, but also it will really be about people. There's an idea from Kevin Kelly I love. which is that the goal of life should be to become yourself by the time you're on your deathbed. Put another way, you shouldn't aim to be the best, but to be the only. I called the show Dialectic because it's fun to say, and because if I've been told I'm good at anything, it's sparring with people about their ideas, pushing them to click down one level deeper. I hope this show will feel like watching a great tennis rally, seeing some sparks fly, but ultimately trying to get closer to truth, to lessons, to wisdom, and to really, again, what makes people tick. I think this is going to be a tough balance to strike with an interview show, but as the show progresses, I really hope to push my guests in creative ways. Episode one is with Jason Liu. He's a technologist, machine learning and AI expert, consultant, teacher, and among other things, a guy who can talk. He spent... The early part of his career as a software engineer, primarily in machine learning and AI at a company called Stitch Fix. And then he ran into this weird wall where he had a hand injury that prevented him from being able to write code. And it caused him to go off on a number of side quests from jujitsu and freediving and pottery to kind of like reckoning with his ambition in his career if he couldn't do what he had done for his entire career. And then he came back around on technology and... Used a number of new solutions in the form of LLMs for coding and things like Cursor, but also writing purely with his voice and finding clever ways to monetize what was in his brain. In short, he's helping companies navigate the world where LLMs are dominating everything in software. He spent the last year building a large consulting practice, helping modern AI companies think about all kinds of things, from hiring to system implementation to more specific things like RAG or retrieval augmented generation.

He also created Instructor, which is a large library with almost a million downloads a month. And as I mentioned, this man can talk, he writes, he can tweet, he knows how to do volume. And so I'm so excited for you to get to listen to him talk about a whole bunch of things. Most importantly, and I think you'll see this as much as Jason is quite opinionated, he just has a beginner's mindset and he has sort of a willingness and a humility to approach everything from, to use a cliche idea, first principles. in a way that I find really energizing and helpful. So I think you'll learn a lot. I definitely did. And I hope you enjoy the conversation. So with that, we'll jump into it with Jason talking about sharing lessons from his consulting business with his email subscribers and specifically how getting paid $700 an hour and $30,000 in a month for doing interviews was actually him getting screwed. Here's Jason. There's one company. They're paying me like $700 an hour to do a job interview. Okay. I was like, oh my God, this is sick. All that I do is like, can you tell me more? At the end of the month, they make me, I make $30,000. Do you think I'm winning or losing? In what dimension? Over like three months. You're losing based relatively. Yeah, because the recruiter made $160,000. Because the recruiter takes 20% of first year salary. Okay. When the head of AI joins, the question he asks first is, how long has Jason been around and how long will Jason be around? Because I think I saw him on a podcast. And it's really nice that someone with so much domain expertise is on the project. The roadmap he presented me was like, zero why he got hired. I'm not going to say that, but it felt like it, right? They get this four engineers and the head of AI. Five months later, they raise to Series B. So, like, I make 30, the recruiter makes 150, the founder is up a couple million, and, like, even the head of AI's equity just went up. And I was the most exploited person in the room. Is the meta lesson here that, like, this is how the most effective people in the game of capitalism play? Yeah, so now my understanding is all the questions I have to ask has to point to what is the biggest outcome possible.

Right? Like, what I said was, I'll lay your bricks. And what I said was, I'm a really good bricklayer. Right, right, right. The recruiter is like, I'll find you a great team. Yeah. Right? And then the developer is like, what is it going to cost you if people move in six months late? What is it going to cost you if you can't get this done before the winter comes? Right. It's going to cost you millions of dollars. Right, right. Right. Right. And so I understand this other developer might be cheaper. Whereas most people are like, oh man, my bricklaying rate is not high. Yeah, right. The person working the hardest at a hotel is the person changing the sheets. But a capital allocator is just like, okay, where do I park $100 million? Anyway, so that's kind of like... So I tell all these lessons over a couple of weeks. I was like, oh, these people are so committed. And you don't need that many people. Do you think they were committed because of the story or because you were pulling back the curtain on reality? That's an extreme statement. I think it's both. Right. It's like, okay, well, if this is how real this person wants to be, I don't know. Maybe they want to ask my personal questions. Maybe they want to understand what the journey was. I'm also very real. I left tech after 10 years and I started consulting. It wasn't like I graduated and I wanted to make some fast money. Right. Can I tell the acid story? This is the thing I think post-acid. I hope you have this feeling too. I'm on acid. I'm in Oregon. I'm looking at a lake. I'm thinking about my responsibilities as in my family and to my partner at the time. My vision goes to white. I see God. God just says, Jason, you're trying so hard to be a somebody. let me give you the feeling of being a nobody. And for like some moment, I get the feeling of like nobody-ness. And the world was like super light and like everything was pleasant. And I was like, oh my God, like there's just, like, I don't know how to describe it, but like just imagine this idea of like being a nobody is like so much more liberating.

And it lets you do anything that you want and, like, play with everything. It's like, I'm just trying shit. When you say being nobody, being a nobody, are you describing being someone insignificant or are you describing not being anything or not being someone? Not being anything in relation to other people. Like, I think being a somebody, at least in the Confucian sense, there's, like, the roles you play. Yeah. Like, you must be a good son, a good teacher, a good student, a good husband, a good brother. Yeah. All right. and it's like okay take that all away oh there's no like commitment to anything there's no quest right it's like you talk about like there is a me shaped hole in the world yeah but now i think of it as like if if you're in a river and there's a little divot the water will just kind of like rush in yeah and like you make the u-shaped hole yeah right it wasn't like the hole was there and the water flows in it's like this little swell is what creates the bigger like reservoir and yeah after the trip i was like oh like yeah i shouldn't try to be anybody let me just like fuck around uh how do you relate that to um meaning and purpose it's just created along the way is it observed in hindsight or are you are you running a purpose and meaning algorithm up front around intention and how you evaluate what you choose to do or are you sort of just realizing the meaning when you look back oh it's definitely looking back right because it's like i do because everything i'm doing is like through first principles right it's like oh like i i'm so overworked i gotta go hire people or hiring is hard like you definitely can probably make more progress with better advisors up front but then it's like there's so many myths on like what you should and shouldn't do like i don't know what the trade-offs are like everyone says in the vc world you should have like a co-founder but everyone i know is going through like co-founder breakups yeah right everyone's people are like oh you should have like married like the girl at 26 and now my friends are getting divorced and i was like okay we're actually i'm just lighter but if you go to the water analogy it's like the water doesn't see the crack

And, like, want to open it up. There's not an opinionatedness there. Right. But when you fill in the crack, like, he can still, like, split the mountain. I don't know how to describe it. Yeah. You don't... You're, like, a highly agentic person who doesn't seem to plan very much at all. Who's just sort of, like, iterating. I think that's, like, inside of a lot of this. Yeah. Do you plan at all? I have... Okay, so I think there was a time to plan. And I think most people plan too much. Okay. I have rarely planned more and, like, had a better outcome. But I don't build bridges or airplanes. Right. Yeah, there's a contextual kind of gradient. What about judgment? Do you think you have good judgment? Or do you think much about judgment? I think I think more about elasticity. I want to believe that I have like so much abundance. If I make the wrong hire or make the mistake, you'll still be fine. And you're also a live player. So you're going to keep iterating. Yeah. It's like. Because there is a judgment of like, oh, should I have lent this person money? And like, will they pay me back on time? But really, I think it's just like I want to live a life that's so abundant that like if you if I give it and you like. Bounce. OK, well, I made a mistake. Continue. going down the path like i think the goal is for me it's like i want to have better judgment like overthinking judgment is still much easier than just like okay here's the money like if you give it back this is sick but if you don't like i will be okay because i want to be you so you're resilient but are you do you think you're limiting what you your potential this goes back to being somebody maybe but are you limiting your potential because you are like is there a possibility space that you're not accessing because you're not um for lack of a better term planning yeah but i also think like in the advice article wrote there's like a like a great person is not a good person okay say more and i don't even know if being more ambitious will make my life better and i had hurt my hands earlier like in my 20s

from being an ambitious person so like i don't even know like if i go fill the space of ambition like i'm still taking from something else and like i don't know if it's always worth it is so ambition and sort of um long-term planning are parallel track but there's plenty of ambitious people let's say who are like don't really have a vision and aren't really planning but they're just sort of like vibrating really yeah There are also people who are not ambitious, but who have, like, well-thought-out, structured plans for, e.g., making sure their family situation ends up working out or whatever. Yeah. Do you not think of those as being correlated? I don't think it's served me much. I actually got a coach, like, last week with, like, a really great breakthrough. But literally, the week before, I was like, man, like, I should make sure I have, like, six months of salary saved up for every single employee. if the business does not go well i want to um make sure i have like enough severance like everyone taken care of but then if i want to move to new york then i have to right right i was super anxious i just had this conversation i don't even remember what the conversation was about but at the end i was like i will just figure it out everything's okay because i also the future version of me will only be more capable smarter and it'll just be easier for that person too So worrying about the future is almost not trusting my future self. But I have no evidence that I make worse decisions over time, and I have no evidence that, like, I can't figure things out. So I made that connection, and now I'm just much less anxious. I think also for many of us, at least for myself, thinking thoughtfully about the future. um or planning even is rarely decoupled from anxiousness and worrying about it you know and those don't necessarily need to be the case but i think for most of us like the reason probably like less planning is helpful is that all the planning is always coming with that like yeah anxious um which prevents to your point like being more of a live player resiliency yeah these things when was the acid trip

Like two years ago, three years ago. And has this primary lesson lodged itself very firmly? Does it come up at times? I don't think it's lodged. I just think I remind myself that the feeling of nobody is also equally as great as feeling like you're somebody. You've written a lot about confidence and fear. obviously there's some connection here but i'm curious how you've like managed to move through and you've also across like a whole bunch of different domains pre and post the hand injury like jujitsu um ceramics all the recent stuff work-wise like is the anchoring around moving through fear how how tied is it to this like oh i don't need to necessarily be somebody or there are other other ways you kind of like Are you acting despite fear? Are you moving through fear anyway? Maybe the better version of the question is what is the relationship to fear now? I don't know if I have fear. I know I'm very anxious, but I also know it's usually not very productive. I'm not someone that forgets my passport at the airport, so I don't need to be anxious about the flight. The line I think about is confidence is the memory of success. And I think I'm finally old enough to just have succeeded enough times at the things I've tried. That the next time I try something, there's just not much doubt. I don't know how it would be possible to do that when you were 15. Well, what did you do? Well, I just learned jiu-jitsu and I got my ass beat for like six months. And then one day I got better. And then, you know, someone else came in the gym and they were a little bit heavier than me. But they hadn't trained and I beat them. And I was like, oh. This is learning something. I've learned something. And then all your friends beat you up and you're like, fuck, I wasn't good at all. Then you go to another gym, a different gym. They haven't seen all your tricks. You're like, oh, I'm learning again. Same with pottery. You do stuff, it's bad, it gets better. You develop language to figure out how you want to express yourself and your taste.

And you just see yourself get better constantly. And I don't think that's like one accident. I think I try very hard to be better at things. But at this point, the next thing I do, I just know that that's going to happen. Like I've never not been able to just like go through the wall. and now at this point you have enough of a you have enough of a memory built up yeah that it's but it wasn't like uh you know like you just grow up this like level of confidence it was just like oh well at this point like why would i i have no proof but i'm gonna be like a loser anyway when proof is what you get wrapped up in when you're busy making plans You're sort of looking for proof that the next step of the plan is going to work. Yeah, and you think you're smarter because you can come up with all the edge cases. And it's like, I don't know if it works that way. Because you don't actually know what you're going to do then. And maybe now the memory of success is like, oh wow, future Jason's going to figure it out because they'll have more information than current Jason. Let me just solve current Jason problems and then future Jason can solve future Jason problems. Like why am I saving up so much money for future Jason? Do I think future Jason is like a bum who like got lucky once and could never do it again? Right. I think that's how a lot of us act. Yeah. Yeah. Like when I started the business, I just put, I just started a new bank account and I was like, great. I'm just going to like, I live in my mom's house for like two months and let me just like do it again. and now this bank account in one year has as much money as i had saved up all of my 20s and i was like oh interesting and you got to be a beginner again yeah right which almost maybe adds a lightness to it yeah but it's like yeah because you have the safety net of like okay i can do these do these things but also because i think i don't have many mentors you do so many things from first principles that everything you do you just deeply believe in

There's very little, like, oh, man, well, like, they told me to watch out for this, and they told me to watch out for that. I just had to, like, do this thing very scared, see the result, and be like, okay, well. Like, for example, I had scaled down my consulting revenue to do the course. I scaled down my revenue. So I was, like, doubling every month for five months. And then I scaled down 80% of that income to do the course. And, again, I was like, man, like. Was it a mistake to cancel all those contracts to make this bet? Like, what if they're going to think I'm a scammer on the internet? Oh my god, like, it took me five months to get here and I just threw it all the way to record YouTube videos. Like, oh my god, what did I do? Then you do the course and in that one month you made more money than all the five months combined. Like, okay, now I truly understand the importance of taking big bets and big swings. And at this point, I haven't really failed in a dramatic way. And maybe that's a perspective thing of when it doesn't work out, I don't really see it as a failure. I can't even tell at this point. But it's like, oh, yeah, I need to be taking bigger bets because that was clearly actually a medium-sized bet. I didn't even understand. Yeah, the Overton window is moving. Right. And now it's like I'm willing to take bets using revenue that I have not made yet. Whereas before, it's like, I will never have a month with negative cash flow. I can't do that. That's too scary. What if it continues to slip? And now, oh, I'm going to start this newsletter. Let me go hire a writer and a designer. Let me set this up. And then I'll go sell the thing. You're more elastic. Yeah. And you have the confidence now. The money will come. So I'm much more willing to invest money now to just make my life easier. Whereas before, I want to pay everyone else on success. But then I give them like 30%. And now I'm like, oh, I'm willing to pay you $10,000 this month to help me out because I know that the ROI is still going to be worth it. And that was, the fact that no one told you that and you just believe it, I think is very, very refreshing. The entire through line of this too is one of, and I suspect this would generalize to many kind of elite performers, is that

in in some true sense i think if i if i told you like i'm actually resetting you to zero in whatever money but also other things the at least the vibe you're projecting is one of like an excitement to get to like like play the game again yeah but it's like or at the very least a lack of a preciousness of like i'm on my pile and like i can't possibly get come down from this like local maximum Yeah, but this is the funny thing that I told my friend. It's like, I want to be rich the same way I want a six-pack. It's like, it's just going to be what I deserve. And, like, I don't deserve a six-pack right now. Why not? I'm just not working out. You get what you deserve, though. Right. Do you think that's true? No. Okay. But I think you... The advice article I wrote is advice for young people, lies I tell myself. I feel like most people miss this part, but it's like you have to just believe it because then maybe I'm acknowledging that the world is much more difficult and scary and more sinister, but if you don't believe those lies that confidence and memory is success or that pessimists are losers or great people are Might not be, like, good people. The world just, like, feels harder. And you have a little to stand on. It sort of collapses. There's, like, a fuzziness to everything. Yeah, and, like, you're kind of playing life. Okay, I'm going to make a really silly segue, which is, have you ever played Elden Ring? I haven't. I know. I'm pretty familiar. But people really yell at you for playing the game a certain way. Okay. Right? Like, oh, like, you use magic. Like, you shouldn't do that. All right. And it's like, no, no, no. If you choose not to do those things, you're just playing a harder version of the game. Right. The person who complains about you using magic, there's a guy who's beating the game without rolling. And there's another guy beating the game without leveling up. Right, right. You can make it increasingly harder on yourself with arbitrary. Yeah. There's a lot inside of that. Because the lie is like, oh, the only way to play this game is with just a big sword. And you just got to hit things and dodge. And if you can't do that, you have no skill.

If you are a pessimist, you are just playing your life as a challenge run for no reason. The only real boundary of play is what the game designers coded and maybe even something beyond that. Do you think you're putting any boundaries like that in your life right now? Probably, but I don't know if I notice them anymore. I think this is kind of growing up a little bit. Taking more and more of those things and, like, seeing them. Like, growing up, like, so, like, I grew up super poor. I remember, like, I had the conversation last week. I beat the first three Pokemons that I ever played without using a potion. Because I was just, like, saving up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In case I need a... The hoarding mentality. In case I need them, right? And I was like, oh, I see. I'm just fucking... That's just, like, poor behavior, right? And it was, like, the first time I ever made a financial bet was, like, last... Like this last quarter when I was like, oh, let me go hire a writer to build out the thing before I sell it. Because there is no in case. The next step is you make money. Right. Like that's, yeah, you're supposed to hire a writer to promote the thing and build the advertisements. And then you just run the advertisement and then more money will appear. Yeah, everybody else sitting around being like, what if I need potions? yeah and i was like oh actually like i should just use the potions and and because as you play the game you make money and if you if you don't die so much you actually lose less of the experience and then you're like oh i'm i'm trying to just figure out like what are the random rules i've set for myself that's making my life a challenge run and just like not do that right like i'm like at the age of 30 i like use my first potion it is incredible like oh man that that cuts deep man i think that hits for a lot of us it's like yeah it's like i'm like super cheap on flights for no reason i hired an ea now and now it's like i don't even know how much the flights cost my life is just better but it's like well i do this for business so it's all gonna it all adds up to being a net positive yeah right it's like i hired a writer so i don't have to like be on a computer all day

There's an essay I really like. The title of it is literally just called Things You're Allowed to Do. And it's this. It's just like this possibility space of potions where it's like, oh, if you want to learn something, there's like PhD students you can pay like $30 an hour to personally tutor you. You can just do it. Yeah. Even with the courses, it's like, oh man, I don't want to be seen as a scammer because I'm selling these courses. And then I bought a book for $300 called, like, How to Price Effectively. I read that book. I made, like, six lines of changes in my website. And within three months, I closed the contract for $110,000, all paid up front. Over, like, a $300 book. And I was like, oh, the book was free. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But everybody else is, like, on it. yeah uh three dollars right like there's a the other mindset is like a tick tock i watch was like yeah it's like this fucking dude's like he comes with bags like what if i told you this bag is five hundred dollars and would you buy this bag and it's like the his message was like if you have like a much more like like the poor mentality is like why does like how fuck you like i'm not buying a three hundred dollar bag but the abundance mentality is like oh what's in the bag So the other thing now I'm always asking is like, okay, what's in the bag? We talk about price afterwards, but like what's actually in the bag? Do you think how there's a, there's a sort of meta point that I'm quite interested in, which is like, is, is, can you teach agency? Can you move people sort of up the agency curve? Have you taught either personal, like friends in your life or clients or in your, in your courses? Do you relate at all to the idea of teaching agency? That's in some ways kind of what you're talking about. And if so, like, have you found any effective ways of like helping people to see the water on this type of stuff to use their potions? I think so. I mean, part of the consulting course is like the last section is on proposals. And the message I have is how much you're able to charge as a function of how well you can describe what they truly want.

and be responsible for it. Like, if I lay bricks for a builder, six months from now, they are not celebrating the bricklaying. What are they celebrating? Oh, it got built on time. Or, you know, there were no... Or better yet, we sold the apartments in the building. Exactly. Right. Oh, now it becomes... We're getting rent payments. Exactly, exactly. Okay, well, how can you figure out on what spectrum you're comfortably able to sit in? And then demonstrate proof that you can actually deliver on those objectives. And the better you do that, the better you understand that problem. And the more you can demonstrate accountability for that final outcome, the more you can ask for. Yep. Right. And not only that, maybe this is the tie with agency is the more you do that, the less you are a commodity. Because now my services include like, I will invite you to dinners. That's not like an hourly rate that one bills. Yep. But if I know your goal is to raise a series B, what you can include in your offer as like a person with high agency is very different than I will write you some code. The vessel might be code, but now it becomes, oh, I'll build you the product and then work with your users to figure out what needs to improve. I could train your team to build this themselves or also hire for you. I can also help you understand how this product becomes a product that collects data and help you navigate that roadmap on your pitch deck and explain this to investors. And I can introduce you to investors and I can introduce you to my friends who can give you feedback as long as you know what they actually want. And I think anytime I've hired somebody, if they asked me what was at stake, why did I need to hire somebody now? and they truly demonstrated that they could do that, I would be personally willing to pay way more. But instead, I'm kind of gluing people together and I'm gluing tasks together because it's not quite there yet. But now, if they could do that, I'm probably getting days of my life back per week. And how much do I value that? It's like a percentage of my whole life. Right.

Do you see yourself as sort of intentionally building any amount of leverage? So much of that answer in some ways is just like giving other people leverage. I don't think I'm good at that yet. Interesting. I see some of that, but say more. I just know I'm not that good. Like I think in the extremes, I still sometimes think, oh man, like I should have done this myself. And if that's the case, I don't even think is their fault. It's probably because I did not explain the what or the when or the how or the why. And I need to take that role seriously. Because you're so used to being the execution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what that means is really it's just like a bricklayer yelling at a bricklayer. Like nobody's winning and nobody's impressed. Yeah, you're quibbling many levels down. All right. You know, it's like, oh, I'm just like yelling at someone for like doing the dishes poorly. It's like, no, no, but like, how's the family, right? Like that's, and so I don't think I figured it out yet. You've hired some people recently on the note of leverage. What does that feel like? It's still hard. I wish, it's like, I wish they could tell me what I want. Right. Aren't you in the business of telling people what they want? And because I know what they want. Yeah. Oh, really? Which is why I feel very good about asking for more of the result. Would you say that you are... It's not that you're so good at telling people what they should want. It's actually that you're on some level empathetic to what they really want or need and good at identifying them. Does that distinction make sense? Yeah, it's specifically in the I am building machine learning products that need to collect data to, you know, create this idea to fly. Like that part, I've just been doing that for five years. So if you've been doing that for less than five, I feel pretty good that I can just tell you where the bodies are. But am I good at marketing and newsletters? No. So am I like between hiring an employee and paying?

like $700 an hour for a coach. I would almost rather hire the coach or the agency. This goes back to being told what to do. Right. And it's like, this is actually out of my like skill range, in which case I need to find someone who's like better at me than that. But that's like the CEO needing to hire like a VP. You mentioned not having mentors. Yeah. Isn't that kind of what like the coach, have you not had mentors by choice or by circumstance? Probably both. Okay. Do you view mentors as something different than the kind of coaching scenario you just described? No. Again, after selling a course, I was like, damn, I'm actually helping people. I wonder who could help me. It's not a flex to have no mentors. I think that's also a silly challenge run. I beat the game without a tutorial. Like, I beat a game with, like, no equipment. Right. And it's like, okay, but why? Man, that generalizes so devastatingly. Like, just go down, like, yeah. It's like, I don't want to ask for help. I mean, this is just what therapy is. Right. It's like, oh, you want to ask for help? You're going to beat the entire game without doing any side quests? You're just underleveled. Have there been any areas where you've, maybe this coaching example has won, but... Any recent areas where you've asked for help in a way that was a little glass shattering? Or you finally realized you should have been asking for help? I think it's like every time I've asked for help. Why are you perpetually asking for help? I'm working on it. Yeah, I think we all are. So the coach at heart is like... just like a life coach and the first call was like dude i feel anxious all the time i feel like i have to just keep working harder and like the moment i stop i'll be homeless and then afterwards i'm just like no life will always be easier for me because i've built like i've i've set myself up already like it only gets easier and i don't have to be someone right but it's like for a thousand dollars you can change your mind that's great

And the next day, I lost a client. And I go, oh, okay, I guess I'll tell Tom I'm available. And then I got, like, got it, came back. The variance is way lower. Yeah, and I was like, oh, like, the client turned, great, I can email two people, see if one of them is interested. And then they were, and I was like, great, nothing changed. Like, it turns out, even the Jason, four days in the future. Could have handled it. And I was like stressed out for a week with like a headache. And then it turns out Jason can just like send an email and get another client. Why? Because I built my life. Right. Do you think more people should be consulting or fewer? I don't know what a young person has to offer. What's a young person? Like a new grad. Okay. Yeah, like, I don't know. I don't know what, because what I do is I just kind of just tell you all the mistakes I've made. Right. It's very much a product of experience. Yeah, I'm purely just, like, I don't have that many frameworks. Like, I just have, like, three or four frameworks that I've applied. You know, I don't have, like, this, like, 30-page SOP of, like, this is how you fire somebody. This is how you hire somebody. But just along my vertical, I'm just very specialized. You're also doing less producing these days than you maybe used to be. It may be an important definition in the kind of contract work or consulting work. You're teaching more than you're producing. Yeah. In that same sense, I think it, I don't know if even, like, should people be consulting is the question. I think one thing that could be more interesting, should more people be independent? contractors right that's a much better version of the same question and i kind of think the answer is yes okay like i'm going back to water like like six if i'm about to water and i give a talk what success would look like is two years down the road someone says oh my god jason i went to your talk and i've just started like a solo business of like me and like three people and we're making like a million dollars a year

Because that risk feels very low now. Right. I don't know how many people I could give a talk to and they say, oh my god, Jason, I raised venture capital and now I run like a $100 million company even. I think that's very, very hard still. Arguably getting harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think with AI, I think there's going to be so many more individual... Small businesses making a couple million a year and having like a fairly calm life. Can you distinguish, I guess in my head, being an entrepreneur? Yeah. Being independent, but specifically like building your own product or, and I guess obviously you could be entrepreneurial in a service sense, but I'm kind of drawing it. Producing something of your own versus servicing somebody independently. whether that being in kind of like agency type work or just being an independent, talented person who isn't a full-time employee. Yeah. Is it worth drawing that distinction? And is your point about AI, does it apply to both of those things? I think so, right? It's like, if I became the next McKinsey, the problem I'm actually solving is just recruiting. I don't know if I want to solve that problem. I think Hormozy has an example of different service industries are solving different problems. If you are doing personal training, everyone wants to be a personal trainer. So your problem is marketing, getting customers, getting funnels. But if you hire cleaners, then your problem is just hiring because no one wants to clean their house. So I think in the services industry, it's also kind of the same thing of like, what are the kind of problems you want to solve? And I think if the problem you want to solve is just scaling your own knowledge work as an independent person in like 2024, there's like no better time. I think so many people can be having like a great lot. If you want to do like the big mission and solve the problems for like seven years in a row, like I've done that, which is why it's like more fun for me to be independent because I just get to have Taco Tuesday with my friends.

Is that the only thing you miss about working in a big company? Or is that the only real appeal? Yeah, you have more resources to make longer term bets. I think if I didn't have the hand injury, I would probably still try to go into a philanthropic and open AI because you want to be part of the Manhattan Project of this time. But now that I don't think that's in the cards for me, at least in the next couple of years, it's like, well, I guess I... I guess I'm just supposed to enjoy my life, which is like not the worst. Not the worst thing. Not the worst thing. If you could, well, maybe we're just talking about like hand injury wise, you can code now, but at a less, less volume and less speed than you used to be able to, or just their diminishing returns and eventually you, it hurts. Yeah. I think if we got in a heated argument and I texted you really fast for like 20 minutes, my hands would hurt. I can't text that much. It hasn't really affected my eating or anything like that. Even when I write, it's all speech-to-text. What about writing code? Cursor. But the cursor input is speech-to-text. Wow. So I just select code and I talk. Crazy. If I told you you could have... a meaningful level of impact at a Manhattan Project type company without writing code? Maybe it's teaching, maybe it's managing, something like that. Would that be appealing? At this current point, I think the bigger question is what is the problem I'm solving? If I'm managing, am I solving the bureaucracy problem? Is that the problem I want to solve? Is sales the problem I want to solve? That's a pessimistic way of looking at managing. Or cynical. But it's also realistic at times, right? But the other version of the picture would be like, you do a lot of teaching in your current work. You're clearly decent at it. And a great manager is somebody who just teaches and uplifts and enables really talented people. Like Phil Jackson is a great coach. Yeah.

I think if the prom was interesting, I would be interested. Which is like a shitty answer, but that's kind of like... What are you motivated by? I want to figure out how to live a good life. Yeah. That's like a weird answer, but... I think that's it. Like, it would be great to sort of be in my 40s and like talk to my kids. This is like... Yeah. I lived a great life. Let me tell you how to look at the world. That would be super cool. There's some teaching inside of that, too. Yeah. I want to think I know how to live a good life and be right. Do you think you were motivated by the same thing five years ago? No. I think five years ago was legacy and leaving an impact on the world. do you think you will be motivated by what you are now in five years or maybe in 10 years? That would suggest that there is something more important than living a good life, which I think is possible, right? Well, there's maybe a distinction here, which is being motivated to live a good life for yourself and being motivated to figure out what living a good life means. I think you were saying the second thing. Yeah. I think success would really be... I think success would really be like my kids going like, yeah, I did the thing, dad thing, and I think he's right. It's like the playbook. Yeah. I think that's a generational impact, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe that's some grand thing, and maybe it rolls down to a couple of tidbits of use the potions and... Oh, yes. You don't have to be someone, whatever. Yeah, I like... It's like, beat the game and then do the challenge runs. And the challenge runs are really fucking cool. Are there any challenge runs that are interesting to you? It doesn't have to be... I mean, in business, it's just like... Yeah, I just like put all my money into my savings. I started a back account and I was like, let's...

wow it took me it took me eight months to save up as much money as i did in like seven years cool and also that that's illustrative of the ways that maybe the goalpost might build right but but that's also just like oh wow like you know uh that's kind of like a like you beat the what's that speed run one that's like any percentage right oh that's cool like I'm not doing the start in VC and make a billion dollar challenge run. I don't know. One thing I would love to do in some part of my life is make $100,000 selling art. I guess that's more of a side quest and a challenge run. I don't really know. I have some of these fun missions along the way, but they're not all business related. Yeah, because it's like, again, it's like being rich and having the six pack to me is like the same goal. If I do a couple things and like live this lifestyle, you just like get the six pack. Do you, you know what I mean? It's like if I just develop my skills in marketing and like learn a little bit about like, you know, like sales and positioning, hey, you got a business. Right? It was like pretty cool. And you can like, And once you figure out this, like, business thing, what you realize is just, like, there's so much value out there to capture. And all you have to do to, like, make more money is to present something that the world wants. And it's, like, so obvious now. So, okay, great. If I ever need money, I just have to, like, offer the world something. Well, on the note of maybe other things or non-business things, I see you as someone who's pretty prolific or at least done a whole bunch of different things. And yet you also are at least fairly focused and consolidated in some sense. Like, do you think that most people swing to one end of that spectrum? Is that something you're intentionally thinking about? Is it just comes easy to you? How have you managed to? I don't know if I have focus. I think I spend 10 hours a week.

on tiktok okay that's focused it's crazy if i value if i value myself at the hourly rate that i build on that that content better be pretty good it's crazy um i don't know if i'm actually that focused i think i think the thing that is my superpower is sort of connecting the dot across many unfocused things right it's like I think I have like two newsletters. I'm doing the consulting thing and also selling courses. And now I'm doing like jujitsu and pottery. It feels very unfocused. Right. And. But most people don't have time for any of the things they want to do. And you somehow have time for all of these things and you're doing them in a competent enough way that implies some level of focused. Maybe your context switching a decent amount. But when you're there. You're maximizing that time. OK, so here's an analogy that I had in my like fourth year. Of like my math degree. Where I somehow laid it out. Where I was taking five courses. But to me. Each one I believe was the same math problem. So I'm just doing like. I'm just doing like eigenvalues. In like five different ways. Right. And then it just doesn't feel like five things really. Right. It's almost like asking, like, if you went to an athlete, I was like, how do you do so many sports? Like, I see you play golf and then also basketball and run track. And like, well, I'm just an athlete. Like, like the boundary of the sport does not feel like the right boundary. And clearly some of the inputs work across domain. Yeah. So it's like, it's not actually. so like yeah in math there's this notion like effective degrees of freedom right it's like there's degrees of freedom but if you some of them are limited like actually you can express everything in fewer degrees right and it's like well like when I was taking that course it really felt like I was taking like two and a half courses like it wasn't five courses and so I think of when I do other things like well to you it looks like I'm doing like seven things but like what am I really doing

I'm trying to figure out what people want. And it turns out in any kind of business, that's like the only thing. And then I'm also developing the skill of like writing an offer. So I'm only doing two things. I'm doing like lead generation and then writing offers. What about including some of these more personal discipline things or creative things? I don't know. Maybe you think it's jujitsu and pottery, for example. the same problem i think the principles are the same which is don't just don't try fancy okay now like if you want to be effective just stop trying fancy like this simplify yeah like just stop watching youtube and just like do it and then try to forget as much as possible and then everything you remember is extremely effective there's a guy named visa con on twitter yes you know he's got the whole thing about like just draw the owl and like just draw 100 owls yeah yeah i just i feel like so many things i learned when i was younger it's like oh man like on youtube i saw this thing we tried this thing then you lose we're looking for shortcuts maybe yeah but it's it's like in jiu-jitsu it's like how do i get better at jiu-jitsu it's like time on the mat right like every black belt has the same answer time on the mat and then every beginner has like their own answer do you think you're good at things you um enjoy or enjoy the things you're good at i definitely good at i'm good at the things i enjoy right like if i've gotten like i've definitely nearly like failed courses i just like don't respect them yeah yeah yeah i don't have proof that i could like push through anything yeah So there's clearly something there, which is that you chose jujitsu and not X. Like the critical input to time on the mat is liking to be on the mat. It's the Novak Djokovic, I like to hit the tennis ball. Yeah. How do you decide what to – I don't know. There's 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds named Jackson trying to figure out what they're –

great at or what they should do and some maybe it just happened on jujitsu and it like was was right but how do you decide what to try to get good at if it maybe the question isn't how do you get good at things it's how do you decide what to get good at is that fair maybe maybe i'm missing the point still hmm i don't even know i just feel like i just enjoy knowing i can be good at things So it's like the meta skill is like the true reward. Have you tried stuff that you were like, not for me? Or coding, jujitsu, free diving and pottery? Maybe it's cope, but I just see it as like, I feel like I am unwilling to make the sacrifices to be good at this thing. So I'm not going to try. But the stuff I am willing to try, great. Yeah, so I guess maybe that's just an exchange rate for time. Yeah. No, I actually think there's a lot. there's and there's some draw there's some energy i what am i what am i sort of working definitions of sort of like how you get to taste is like i think it costs rick rubin less energy to like listen to the incremental amount of music than the rest of us yeah and so like it's just like he can just listen to more music and so like he's gonna have better taste yeah he's more fit it's it's there's another version of this which is like what's the thing that sort of like nival's version is like what feels like play to you yeah it works The one I like even more is like, what's the thing that sort of seems hard for everyone else that doesn't seem that hard for you? Maybe that's an over-civilification. But there was something that drew you to the mat. And a lot of people look at jujitsu and they're like, hell no. Like, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that drew me, okay. I think that what draws me to many things is seeing that more knowledge. is like an incredibly powerful like horse multiplier like because yeah i think it's like okay the outcome is force times leverage right and there is like a whole range of things that you can do but there are certain things that you can be thousands of times better at like nobody is deadlifting like even 10x more than the average person you know what i mean yep

Like, the average person does, like, maybe 130, and the best person does, like, 1,000. Okay, so, like, world record maybe is, like, 10. But, like, the possibility space of expression is fairly limited. Yeah, like, between the average runner and the fastest runner, I don't know what that number is. Okay. Right. But I think there are other activities where that lever is, like, thousands, you know? Do you, like, chess or go? No, but I definitely think... They're more than 10 times better than me. Yeah, they could be nerd snipes in the future. I think they're probably... I think they're, like, probably thousands of times better than me, right? But... Yeah, so maybe a part of it is, like, those games are more interesting. Because those games are games where, like, determination and force and effort compound more dramatically. I think you could also just say they're more creative. Again, I don't want to litigate creativity, but... On some dimension, like more possibility space is kind of a good proxy for creativity. I would say so. I would say so. Have you ever heard of a guy named Josh Waitzkin? I love his books. Yeah. Very, very Josh. Making the unconscious conscious. Yeah. Well, and his whole thing is like sort of learning is self-expression. It truly is. It's like creativity through. You can play chess musically, you can play chess mathematically. Yeah, and I think you get to a point where you can kind of tell who's who just by the work that they do. That moment is always super fun. At least I want to get to that level. I would love to get to a point where when I listen to music, I can understand the person. like i think i can i can barely do that in jujitsu like if i roll with somebody i feel like i know them better oh it's like a fingerprint almost yeah yeah but i'm not bad with music it just sounds good wow i don't know i love this i don't have the language yet this is cool right like i can like read code like oh this person's like a little nervous and he doesn't think he's doing the right thing and like you know he's like left some options and like how this is but you can see the person in there yeah yeah yeah because i'm just like oh yeah like i

like it's weird but yeah i feel like i can tell code is like not as confident right it has like committed to a decision that is like harder to step back out of right like my personality oh i want to build the dumbest thing possible like i want to make it super simple very easy to like uninstall because i'm confident you're not going to do it anyways right it's funny there's um my My intuition would be that most people – there are a lot of domains, and software engineering being one of them, that at least people without sophistication in them would assume are highly utilitarian. And sort of like there's a very correct way to write a certain type of – there's a correct way to do the job. Yes, yes. And obviously, intuitively, I think more people get that they're in purely creative domains. There isn't a correct way. Pottery. And then – competition is this really beautiful interesting marriage of those two where like chess maybe some people think there's a correct way i think a great chess player would say oh actually no they're and so but the funny thing is i think actually almost every domain is much more like pottery than it is like um math and even math is as yeah many different okay so here's the analogy i think i talked about when i when we talked about this subject which is i mostly hate programmers Because they try to express themselves too much. Too many programmers act like painters and not like animators. You cannot just show up in an animation studio and do your thing. Everyone draws Homer Simpson like Homer Simpson. If you add an extra line in his head, you're doing it wrong. And animation, there's levels of mentorship and review and keyframing. And the people who do the keyframes are different than the people who do the transitions. And some of that work is overseed and all this stuff. That is a production. But I think most of software engineering feels like everyone gets to pick their own medium.

And everyone gets to pick their own frame and their own colors and their own style. And I think it's... I don't think it's good. The irony is that you're almost saying that... And maybe the point would be, to be clear, in both animation and in software, a really experienced person is going to see the fingerprints anyway. But... there's also some degree to which you should fall in line with the style or the design language or the form. Yeah, and if you think about animation, there are kinds of scenes that certain animators excel at. Like in anime, there's like, oh, if you see really good hand-to-hand combat, there's a couple of big guys for that. These are the ones that are exceptionally good at dynamic hand-to-hand combat with wild camera angles, and they come in and they supervise the orchestration. Or it's like Gundam's laser shooting out, rocks exploding into a million pieces. But there's styles. But for the most part, everyone kind of knows that there needs to be some kind of cohesion. I feel like in a lot of software, there is no cohesion. Everyone wants to do it their way, because they're just like... demonstration of intelligence. I think that annoys me. Well, and there's some degree, back to the shortcut thing, the person who should express the most style in theory should be the master. I was watching the studio, the Miyazaki documentary recently on making the boy and the heron. Have you seen this? No, no, no. It's amazing. Really, really great. And they end up bringing in the Neon Genesis guy. to animate on Boy and the Heron because Miyazaki's aging. And it's this, like, beautiful version of what you're describing in the positive direction, which is, like, the Neon Genesis guy is a master who's showing up at the foot of the master of masters and is like, I'm going to fall in line. Yes. We don't have a lot of that culture in not just software engineering, but almost anything. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's not even animation. Maybe it's just, like... Actually, no, I think even, like, Cinderella probably has...

like the you know fall online you're an animator you this is the the role you play yeah but yeah i feel like a lot of the code i see is just very wonky because of that like personality well i think i think this is broadly there's there's a meta point here around um probably like western culture and eastern culture one of the clear divides seems to be that the good the good thing about western culture is that we have way more creativity we have way more styles but at some point you maybe rotate past the point of like There's a reason mastery and training and apprenticeship and honing a crafter a really long period of time. Do you think we're losing that entirely in at least maybe the software domain? I don't think it's... I don't know how often that's actually here. Everyone's talking about the death of the junior developer. I don't want to hire junior people. Why? Because the senior people don't want to mentor. They want to just do their job. Yeah. but they and they don't think that mentorship is part of that job right because if you're cracked you're like a 14 year old like we're just coding since forever and right like well why did you need the mentor but i think now because more people are entering the field there's just like yeah very little interest in mentoring like i like the way i coach my developer ivan i like feel bad sometimes i'm just like very like i'm I don't know how to mentor someone in code. I only know how to do it like in pottery and like, you know, jujitsu. Oh, interesting. Maybe there's something about code that makes it a little less apprentice-y. I think it is equally apprentice-y, but it's just like the style is different. I'm just like, oh, I'm going to write this code. You're going to watch me write it? And I'm just going to delete the code and you got to read to produce it. And I feel like an asshole, you know what I mean? Maybe this is what software needs is like a different approach to. Yeah. I mean, you obviously know so much more than I could possibly imagine on this front. But, like, it's not even – even simply the notion of, like, there's a whole bunch of senior developers at Facebook and there's a whole bunch of junior developers. That is not, like, welcome to the sushi shop. Like, I am the master. You are the apprentice. You're going to clean. Yeah. Like, the entire structural dynamic of that is less intimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it would be interesting to imagine maybe it's just product of intimacy and one-to-one pair. And, obviously, there's some of that in these bigger companies.

Yeah, but when I do this style of mentorship, I feel like an asshole. But I'm trying it. I wrote the code. I wanted to add all the comments and then add paragraph descriptions explaining what's going on. I want to read it and I want to figure out whether or not your summary of the code is actually correct. I want to know that you understand and you can read. Even if you think about... the idea of copying right i think because code is so easy to copy no one's actually copying like we're just like oh here's an instrument go play music go listen to music and then play music but no one's like doing covers totally totally and by the way you hear great musicians john there's a john mayer quite i love about this he's like i tried to sound like so and so and it ended up sounding like me yeah there's the grateful that is another and that is the beautiful kind of formation of style. It's like the Virgil Abba 3% idea. It's related. But here's the thing. In code, no one's copying for a study. Everyone's like, oh, Jason, I'm going to build it differently. Everyone wants to build it differently because if you build it differently, you're smart. Huh. That's a good explanation. But in piano, if you could play Mozart, you're a genius. Yes. Yes. What? Yeah. Do you think... How do you think, do you put much consideration into style? In code? Any sense of anything you do. Personal style, in terms of clothing, in terms of your work, in terms of your creativity. Does style happen passively or are you considerate about it? Style feels like an interesting cousin of taste, which is part of, taste has been discussed a lot lately. Yeah, I mean, I think clothing is also different. than many other styles, because clothing is also about external perception of you. What symbols am I choosing to use to express myself? That's how I think about style. But let's go back to the, maybe after the clothing example, style and code is kind of along the lines of what we've been discussing. Yeah, people are like, oh, I want to do it this way and that way, and they're choosing to...

I'll give you a different example. Personal design language in pottery. Having sort of like a model of reality or a model of practice or a model of form. I make, when I do bowls, I do like a turned out lip. These types of things. Maybe I'm conflating multiple ideas here. But it seems that most talented creatives, especially as they... move up the mastery curve implicitly or explicitly express style and even sort of reinforce style. Man, I feel like I'm just like, I don't even know how to give an answer because I don't even think of pottery with like a style. No. Yeah, it's just like my hands just create like a certain shape and like the style is just like what my body is like effective at making. Well, it goes back to the very beginning of our conversation. The depth of the cup is just determined by the shape of my hand. You know what I mean? Okay, so you see the poetics of code, but you view poetry as purely rote. Well, both Jiu-Jitsu and Potter is like, oh, everything is just downstream of my body. You know? Like... if I reduce everything, I am just doing whatever my body is good at. You know what I mean? I don't know how to describe it. If you have a paintbrush, the mark it makes is the mark a paintbrush makes. This is too East Asian woo, but it's like, yeah, the pencil style is just the pencil. If you draw with pencils, obviously there's a different expression of who's holding the pencil. There's no person. I'm the pencil. Do you think your style in your writing? My writing is just me talking. Are writing and talking the same thing? For me, yes. Because I can't write. You write a ton. You don't write a ton of code, but you write some code and you write a ton of words. You also do a lot of talking. And you use dictation to some degree and then also to some degree transcription VLM or even transmutation VLM to write.

Did you write much before the recent advent of MLMs? No, no. Okay. Because before then, I was just the technical person and to like, I don't want to waste my time writing all this shit because I got work to do. But you talked. Yes. Do you edit much? No. So your experience of writing is almost one of like telling another person what to do with clay. That's an extreme degree. Obviously, it's not that. Yeah. All of my blogs are monologues. Monologues into dictation and with ChatGPT or something like that, editing it? Yeah, basically just add some headers. And how close to what was dictated do you think the end result is? My favorite work is the least touched up. Because... Even my text messages are speech-to-text, right? Because everything I say, I don't really say off the cuff. It's almost like I've told this to enough people that when I deliver it, it's going out of cash. It's just the first go. Yeah. What's the description you give? What's like the prompt? Not just the prompt. Prompt and or is there any instructions? Use my words, add some headers, remove filler words. Do not change the meaning of any of it. Yeah. I get quite upset. Have you experimented at all with trying to push it in the other direction? It gets too like, hey, howdy. Do you think in three years you'll want it to do more with your words? Assuming it's a 200 IQ and not a 90 IQ. 90, 100 IQ. In which case, I would rather just have the LLM interview me and write its own content. Really? Yeah. Okay, different question. Would you want to have a great copywriter or copy editor? It depends on what the objective is. Yeah. Right? Is it a sell? Because if it's the sell, I don't need to exist. But if it's to say what you believe, you want to be as authentic as possible.

Yeah, and even if it's, like, me talking about my feelings, I would never want that to be modified in any way unless the LM was interviewing me in a way that drew more out of me. But one would argue if I had an idea that I think this is true and I want more people to believe this, then there's some objective of, like, persuasion. I would want the language model to augment my persuasion because that's what... Right. Like, that's me asking for help. Right, right, right, right. Do you think you've written about writing on the Internet? I think a lot of people view writing as like some kind of meaningful hurdle for any subset of reasons. Do you think that the like talking into the LLM is a path that more people should try? Maybe a broader question would be like how to how do you. You can write it on the internet to sell. You can write it on the internet to shout out a bat signal. You can write it on the internet to think. A lot of people are doing it. You've written that more people should write more. Where do you think the gap is in this? I mean, for me, writing is almost just improv because all I do is I just say it once. I don't really edit that much. Between idea and blog post to being published on my website, it's about 40 minutes. It's amazing. And, like, it's really, like, my writing is, like, very aggressive. It's like, if I get out of the house, oh, I want to talk about, like, this idea. I'll just, like, record a Loom video on my phone. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, copy, transcript, paste with my prompt. And I'll just, like, email it to myself. And then when I get home, I'll just post it. What percentage of those do you publish? The Times, you sort of do some version of that. Probably everything. Oh, my gosh. But there's something that's not adding up here, which is to say either you're just like a generational spoken orator. Most of us have too high of a bar. I think it's for sure the bar. I am a nobody. If 4,000 people read my article, on average, nobody knows me. Say more.

This doesn't matter. Before we turned on the podcast, we were talking a little bit about sort of modern media climate. The optimal strategy is just to flood. Most of us are very concerned. Trump, Rogan, these guys, they just talk a ton. Was that intuitive? This gets into the succeeding on Twitter stuff. It's just Matt time. It's just Matt time. Yeah. But this time it has an audience. When I fight somebody, I have an audience. The president fighting. You know what? There's something inside of this that at least I'm realizing for myself, which is that if I knew that five people were going to read my posts, I would publish way more. Five people's a dinner. Right. Because there's some theoretical possibility of it being out there forever. To your point, no one's reading it, but I'm getting caught up in the... Yeah, because you think you're somebody. I think I'm more important than I am. You think you're somebody and I'm a nobody. I am a livery by the nobody. That's amazing. What about for Twitter? Same thing? I tweet 45 times a day. Is writing on Twitter different than writing long form? You tweet 45? That's crazy. Check my stats. I probably tweet 45 times this year. I really committed to Twitter. I had like 200 tweets and 400 followers January of 2023. I'm at like 28. Thousand. Thousand. How many tweets? 22. 1.7. Jeez. It's just 1.7. Is writing for long form and writing for Twitter different? In obviously some degree, but how is it different? I think it's the same. It's just more words. It is the same. That doesn't seem intuitive to me. So I'll give an example. I find myself ending up writing a number of the essays. i publish or don't publish i think you also like write quality though you know like i think the difference is i most of my writing is like me just like getting beat up by somebody at the gym or like beating up a beginner most of my writing is like i think you write i write plenty of quality so that doesn't mean it's usually exclusive but it's because i like beat someone at the gym that day and a lot of days you get beat up

But I didn't read those. Yeah, why? Because it didn't surface. Right, right. If I texted you... I don't even... I was surprised I wrote 55 things. Right? I was like, what the fuck? Like, seven of them are, like, overlapping concepts. Like, I should have just written one good one. But if I... But you were... There's a creative idea I love a lot, which is you have to get, like, the gunk out first. Yeah. Every artist has 10,000 bad drawings. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like Picasso just got them out when he was, like, 12. Yeah, it's like, you just, you just, like, don't matter. Like, all the good stuff, like, if it was actually good, it would get pumped up. That's the rare thing about the modern world. That's the one, like, as much as people complain about it, the stuff's kind of meritocratic. What in, even if they are kind of similar, what have you learned about what makes a good tweet? It's not just random. oh man i mean i can i can go through like course material i mean so the first thing is the next course no it's it's in the consulting course yeah the consulting course is first be famous step two uh profit no step two is like change your mind about pricing okay and then step three is like give them permission to pay you more money but be famous is basically like are you familiar with like the ada copywriting framework no Attention, information, desire, action. Attention, information, desire, action. Right. So like one idea I have, it's like if I'm on Twitter just for attention, you're like sick. A lot of people are. It's like, yeah, but you can also like date girls for attention and validation. You can like go on dating apps. Like there's no difference. Right. But if you want to actually like. convince someone to something or drive an action. I think ADA is like just a beautiful formula. So attention, information, desire, action. So the attention just says like have a strong hook that makes them stop scrolling. Information is, interest is just, you know, you present them the information that you're supposed to get after they stop scrolling. Something interesting. Yeah. And then desire, you just create some desire with the information you give them in order for them to take an action. And in the action in this case is

Whatever you are asking for. A follow, a like, a retweet. So that's one thing. What percentage of your tweets do you even have a call to action, though? Well, now it's like everything because I have an autoresponder. Oh, so you're basically treating every tweet as a potential billboard if it hits that has a rollout underneath. Yeah, and it's like based on category. Like, it's a good machine. I have the assembly line now, but... Right. But it's just like, well, before it's like, oh, you know, do this in less lines, like in five lines of code. That's... That's attention, right? It's like, oh, I built a system to do this so you don't have to do that. The first two kind of come as attention and information is sort of like you're really trying to give people the information that's actually interesting, but a lot of times that isn't self-evident. And so the attention is like a clever way to make that shine. Right. And the attention should foreshadow the value of having read the information and the reward for taking action. So if my tweet was... This weekend, I went with my friends in New York City, and we had fried chicken. Man, this fried chicken was really good. You've lost me. And another thing I think about when writing this tweet is a tam of the hook. So this weekend, I, if that was the first couple of words, what's the tam of that? Your voice. Right? It's like, yeah, unless you're famous. But if I just said, best chicken in New York. Boom. Right? What's the tam between? I had the best chicken in New York, which is if you want the best chicken in New York. Much bigger. Man, I had the best chicken in New York this weekend. I was with my friends. We didn't know where to go, and this place opened up late. We went, and it was amazing. If you're in the city, you should definitely check this out. That's Ada. But this is very different than like, oh, I went with my friends this weekend, and we didn't know. You've already lost them. Where do you get ideas? It's a hard – maybe the wrong question, but – Well, the sawdust is, like, my consulting. Like, I'm actually just answering people's questions all the time. You have an engine built into your daily – day-to-day. Like, I work at the – like, I work – Yeah, ideas don't come from sitting around thinking about ideas. Ideas come from, like, bashing your head into things. Yeah, yeah. It's always, like – even that I have systematized. I have LLMs.

constantly mining my latest call transcripts for tweets and blog posts. No way. Yeah. Just give us the super basic how that works. So I use, like, I use a meeting notes app, and one of the prompts I have automated is, like, find notable things I've said and, like, summarize it in, like, you need, like, a friend wearable that's just going around all day, every day. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then I also have another one that writes proposals for blog outlines for me. So every meeting. Every meeting. So every meeting I get like three tweet ideas. Circle back. Circle back. Okay. So it's auto transcribing, feeding it all. You've got scripts running. Yeah. And it sends me like a Slack message of like, here's three tweets that could have come. Imagine if they gave Donald Trump this. Oh my gosh. We'd all be done for it. Yes. I have a whole, I have a Slack channel called Content Mind. And it's just like, you had a meeting with this VP. He asked two questions and you said something that where he laughed. And guess what? That tweet hits. Is it actually pretty good? Like it works? That's like three tweets a day. That's like 10%. Really? That's like 10%. I mean, I have like... And your bar, back to the earlier point, your bar for a tweet is not that high. Yeah, the average tweet gets 1,000 readers. A good tweet gets like two in 1,000. Like it doesn't matter. 1,000 readers, how many likes? You don't even care. You're just sure engagement. Yeah, I mean... Yeah, I would say so. The thing I really care about now is newsletter growth. So it's like 30 a day for two newsletters. It's amazing. But it's all the sawdust, right? Can you, just for the listeners, explain the sawdust very concretely? I don't know who had this idea, but basically I think some lumber yard hired some consultants to figure out how to make the lumber yard more productive and more capital effective. And the ultimate conclusion was we should somehow monetize the sawdust that comes out of these saws. And that created another billion-dollar industry of particle boards and mulch and then firewood and all that kind of stuff. And that was just the sawdust. It's just the stuff that is the byproduct of the core business. And my core business now is actually consulting and working with big companies that have real problems and talking to their engineers and them asking me questions.

Which is an amazing engine for all this stuff. Exactly. And it feeds back. Right, right. And so it's like, I've answered the same, and it's great because I answered the same four questions from four different VPs. I write a blog post and the seventh VP comes in and they just said, he just wrote about something six months ago that I've been struggling with for two months. And I go, Grace, let me go pull out from my repository of like 50 blog posts and just inundate you with all the answers to questions you're probably going to have. And they're going to go. OK, well, I just started noticing this today and you wrote about this six months ago. Like, how can we work with you? No, no, no brainer. OK, I have a couple more things to wrap up. Number one, I need the ELI five on rag. OK, OK, OK. For the for the dummies, not not including me. prompt engineering is like this is one of your course you had a big course on rag yeah but rag stands for retrieval augmented generation right and so if anyone has used something like chat gpt if you paste in a blog post you can start talking to chat gpt about the blog post right that's almost like you know giving chat gpt a cheat sheet that they can reference but you might not be able to copy paste like a textbook So then the question is, can you figure out where the answer to your questions might lie in this textbook? This is more like having an open book test. So now the question is, can we talk to an AI and can the AI figure out what to look for and how to read what it sees? You could do this by trying to find relevant books and putting the context, relevant chapters, relevant pages. What you're trying to do is just sort of give the AI enough information so you can answer your question correctly. But the mistake is people are all sort of worried about the LLM answering the question and no one's really been focused on how to do the search very well, right? Turns out, like, if you ripped out the table of contents and the page numbers, an open book task is way, way harder.

But if you put some Post-it notes to help you and organize things, it's way better. If you had summaries of these textbooks, it would be way better. If you gave them the whole library, it's actually not easier, too. And so much of the importance of solving this problem ends up becoming a search problem rather than just sort of, like, the questions and the answers you're writing down. What's the upper bound on the type of thing you would do rag on? Meaning, like, based on that explanation, alone if i knew kind of nothing else you could sort of intuit that that's like what lms do about with all the information yeah obviously that doesn't make sense like what is the sort of boundary of a textbook a whole encyclopedia yeah all of wikipedia so a lot of it is two things right one when you're done training these models you train them at some time step and so all news that happened afterwards is hard to recover right so that's one thing If a sports game happened today, ChatGPD can't know the answer unless it is able to search something, right? The second thing is, ChatGPD will know everything that's on the internet, but there's just a lot of stuff that's not on the internet, right? So, can I ask it questions about my diary? No. But if I gave it the ability to read my diary, then yes, right? And then lastly, just as a matter of trust, I wanted to cite things. I want to be able to read the thing it's citing. And so if I give it the page and it gives me an answer, I can ask, okay, where did you read this? Where on the page? Show me. And can I verify that this is true? Added to the hallucination problem. Exactly, exactly. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do a rag. And a lot of companies, you know, if you're a giant company with tons of Slack messages and documentation and paperwork and contracts, You have to do something that allows LM to search because you can't put it all into memory. How is the Zimmerman embedding? So embedding is just a way of searching, right? So you could be searching things by reading the chapter headers of a book and then putting everything in, right? But what if the chapter is, you know, animals in the jungle?

But then you ask animals in the forest. If you just compared the words, maybe you don't have a match, but maybe you wanted the match. In which case, the embeddings give you a way of matching things a little bit more softly. I see, I see, I see. My last question slash prompt is you inspired in me and it prompted a number of fun conversations, both with us and with people I know. How do you feel about couches? I think couches are evil. I think they're obstructions to intimacy in any household. I think, you know, sitting on couches are, like, make you sedentary. You, like, sit too long. You get tight, you know. I have so many thoughts about couches. But I guess another thing that I really hate about couches is that I'm looking at your living room now. I'm not going to just, like, attack you, but... Please, lay it on. I think when you... create a couch, you kind of force an orientation of how people sit. So you limit the possible views you can have of your own home. Right? And so if you live in a regular living room, if you have a couch, it's just guaranteed to be pointed at a TV. As ours is. It's completely just monopolized how we do attention. Right? And I just find that. Like, yeah, our space is less flexible as a result. It's less multipurpose. Yeah, like, I feel like if we sat on a couch, if we sat on the couch and trying to have a conversation, we would immediately be at the opposite ends of the couch. Because if we did not sit at the end of the couch, you'd be like, what the fuck are you so close to me? It's like the urinal problem. Yeah, you'd be like, why are you so close to me? Yeah. But then it's like the couch is designed to face the TV, but now we're trying to talk to each other. So we're all kind of just like leaning crooked awkwardly, you know? Okay, so what are... If not, couches are, even if they have problems, they are fairly ubiquitous. And what are the alternatives? So I feel like another thing that I don't like about the couch is that it makes the floor like a secret space. It's like if people sit on the couch and sit on the floor, there's like hierarchies and shit that I don't really like, you know? So most of my living rooms for the past like seven years is just the floor with like...

beanbags and cushions and you can move the beanbags around it's never like crazy you can put the beanbags in the in the uh you know closet and just sit on the floor you know if there's five people or ten people in the space it's modular you can all just like sit on the ground and like in a circle and nothing nothing's weird because there actually is no tv or something forcing the view and your view is always the root of this just the backrest is the western obsession with the backrest is someone who kind of has interesting like back and posture issues This is my biggest... I don't think it's the backrest. I want to hear the story. Well, I think, for example, I have floor pillows here. Most people find floor pillows to not be that comfortable. In part because they don't have the... They're not used to sitting in them. They don't have the strength. Literally. I don't think they necessarily have the core strength. But also there's just like whereas I think if you had a bunch of really plush beanbags or even like lawn chair style chairs, it might be more comfortable for people. So there was a study that was like for for the elderly, how well you can get off the ground. So if you were to like go supine, how quickly could you get off the ground? Right. And it was like a very high predictor of just like. overall deaths of falls and like like it's like a predictor of your like lifespan after you're 50 right and it's because people just don't aren't used to like being close to the ground and like even carrying their own body weight on their hands and like sitting is something that's like uncomfortable for them that they have to be enveloped in foam in order to sort of be able to carry their own weight and then big it's all big couch i think it's big chair really like a chair yeah i don't even like the chair Wow. But do you put the couch as worse than the chair? My intuition is the couch is worse than the chair for a handful of reasons, mostly around size, rigidity, and the sort of facing each other problem. Yeah, I think so. Because I have chairs in my home, but the way I place chairs in my home is mostly to curate multiple views. Which the couch limits. Yeah, like if...

Like, there is a chair I ask my friends to sit in to read if I am, like, entertaining them in the kitchen. Right. Because they have a view of, like, the music from behind, but I'm in the kitchen. Control the flow. Right. But there's a different chair I ask my friends to sit in when I work. So you don't see me. It's considered. There's intention here. And it's like, oh, I'm going to do this, like, thing that is, like, I'm not stressful, but just, like, separating. But I can, like, exclude myself from the view of that. I have a second about this, which is I think more so even in the posture and the backrest, I think to your earlier point, it might be the television. I think it's downstream of the television because when the television is there, the best way to watch a television is a couch against a wall that's facing the television. And so when you put the television in, you then put the couch in and the rest of the room is just dealing with these things. The other main thing, when you take away the couch, everyone says, oh, it's less comfortable to sit and watch the TV. Right, because what I really want to be doing is just staying in one place, not talking to each other, staring at a screen. Maybe the path to a couchless, to Tommy Matt kind of wonderful society is one where we all have like vision bros or something lighter. We have glasses and any wall or space. Right, right, right. Like that could be the solution. Or we could just be less addicted to screens, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. Yeah, I'd rather just be looking at each other. It's a beautiful lot to send us off with. Thank you. This was wonderful. This was really fun. Do you have anything you want to, aside from the 25 things you're automatically selling on your Twitter feed and newsletters and courses? What is the thing you want to sell most? Most. Yeah, if you could only pick one. I'm not going to sell anything. I just want to say, you know, I feel like the thing I've been working on with my coach this week was just that the open mouth is the one that gets fed. Wow. You got to just. Ask the world for what you want. And the speaking mouth is the one that gets heard. I think that's another. Oh, yes. The work does not speak for itself. I think a lot of people need to hear that. I read this. The last thing I'll say is I read this amazing. My friend Blake shared this amazing interview with the Duolingo founder. Have you seen this? The engagement. Yes. And it's like the question is, do you prefer engagement or education when there is a tradeoff? And he's like.

No question it's engagement. 1000% of the time you can't teach an empty seat. Yes. The work doesn't speak for itself. Jason, my friend, this was great. See you soon.