Why the Future Is Better Than You Think | Packy McCormick

I think I'm naturally optimistic. I talk to founders all the time who are just, you know, 10 to a thousand times smarter than I am and they have these incredible ideas and they don't write them because writing is hard if you don't do it all the time. The people that we get to talk to every day are doing these unbelievable things that if 5% of them are right, the world is a much much better place and nobody else knows about this stuff. I think there are plenty of people who are still pessimistic and rightly so. And there's just so much cool stuff coming down the pike that I think for at least for our world, it's hard to be too pessimistic right now.

Great to be here.

I saw that. Thank you.

I think that might actually be true. I think it was like a little leak before there was any official announcement.

Thank you. But you know, we just share so many ideas in common and one of them is about writing.

Yeah. So I recently just launched paid my whole thing with Not Boring. In the beginning I was going to go paid and then I was having so much fun with it growing that I was like I just don't want to limit this by you know in any way at all. I'm going to keep it free. And it's been wonderful. It's grown really, really well. But recently, I think because Substack has these leaderboards, and you're not on them if you're not paid, I was like, I need to do something paid, but I don't want to put my stuff behind a pay wall. So, what is it? And I was thinking I thought about a bunch of different ideas. And then I realized like I was just sitting there thinking I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I couldn't think of the first time or the last time that I heard a new idea that had been like kind of formed on a podcast or in video that like really really stuck. And then you think about writing, you think about all the, you know, Ben Thompson and aggregation theory, everything Chris Dixon's written. Like in tech, there's like all these canon pieces and they're all written things. I talk to founders, all you need is attention. Attention is all you need. Attention is all you need. And so I talk to founders all the time who are just, you know, 10 to a thousand times smarter than I am. And they have these incredible ideas and they don't write them because writing is hard if you don't do it all the time. I actually tried last year to write less frequently. I thought I'd give myself more space and I'd come up with these like beautiful big pieces. It's actually harder if you don't just like kind of go. So this year I'm just going. But they have all these ideas. And so I last year was having a conversation with this guy Anjan Katta who makes the Daylight tablet. And he had this idea. We were just texting back and forth. I was like we should write that. And he's like I don't write. I'm scared of writing. I was like you send me voice notes and I'll write it for you. And it went really really well. And so decided to try to get people to write their very best ideas down. I'm trying to figure out kind of what the right format is. So, we just did one on robotics and it was kind of this company thesis that was that robotics should actually iterate in small steps instead of like there's not going to be a moment where robots just kind of wake up and can do everything you need to collect all of the data. And so, that was one. I have another guy who's going to be writing about how the cartels move money because he works in kind of fraud. And so, trying to figure out what you were going to say because he works for the cartels. He's a good friend of mine. But there's just like all these really interesting ideas that people have earned because of what they do or that they are doing what they do because of this idea that they haven't written down anywhere. Maybe they'll write it down in a company blog post but those are like 500 words and you know even the best ones are not the full thing. I think people really like the opportunity to kind of go long and have a canon document where it says kind of like this is how I look at the world and why I'm doing the thing that I'm doing or this is something really interesting that I've learned. I like reading. I listen to podcasts all the time, but I get most of the ideas from reading and so, trying to bring more of that to the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Totally. So, my backstory started my career in finance, did that for a little bit, and then went to a company called Breather, which did on demand kind of meeting and workspaces. And the product was great. Everybody that I tell that I worked at Breather, they're like, "Oh, we use Breather. We love the product." But the business model was take a 5-year lease, do construction, and then rent it out for an hour at a time. And so, you know, if you think WeWork's business model is bad where you do it for months at a time, we did it for hours at a time. And when it works, it really, really works because you can, you know, charge a lot more for an hour than you could charging for a month hourly. But often it didn't work. You know, it was compounded by the fact that we had the same investors as Uber. And they were like, the thing that you need to do is expand your supply as quickly as humanly possible because that's what Uber did and it worked for Uber. Uber didn't sign 5-year leases and do construction. We did. And so we ended up with this glut of supply on the map. I think we launched one of these little office spaces kind of every day for an entire year, which is also like managing to the metric. Like we would put a wall in the middle of a space that should have clearly been one space just to be able to get two spaces on the map, but we did it. And we were deeply oversupplied. Some spaces like right around here in Union Square did really, really well. A bunch of other spaces didn't. And so a coworker of mine, Ben Rollert, and I took Christmas break and we came up with a plan to fix the company. And then we wrote the whole thing down. Like we had read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Like we, you know, it's like high on business strategy. We wrote the thing down. We presented to the rest of the exec team. They actually gave us, you know, we needed to do something because our margins were negative 25% and you know, we had these kind of like fixed leases. Oops. Oops. So we did that and then we sold it to the rest of the company and it meant for a lot of people like if you were somebody whose job it was to set up a space and it was supposed to be set up one way. We said all of a sudden now instead of just doing hourly and kind of daily one space could be hourly but if it's underperforming we're going to sell it monthly for as you know as low as we can still make money. And then maybe somebody wants it hourly and we'll have to switch it all back when they're done. People's jobs got like a lot harder. The sales team had to completely change what they did. And everyone read this thing and everyone got really really into it. Like the idea made sense and it was clear and we put it down on paper and so that was the first time that I was like wow like writing actually can kind of like change the way that people even work inside of a company if you can communicate an idea clearly. It worked for a while. Margins kind of went up to you know positive 25% which you know isn't going to win like a Nobel Prize for business but is certainly was better than it was. Did that for a while. Finally kind of we brought in a professional CEO. We tried to be mini WeWork with, you know, a thousandth of the resources. And then I left because I could see the writing on the wall and then COVID hit and the company fell apart. But I had taken David Perell's writing course kind of during that whole process. And so when COVID hit and I couldn't start the physical space-based thing that I wanted to do, I decided to just start writing online for three months. We had just gotten pregnant with our son Devon. And I begged my wife to let me write and she did and it just kind of started growing. I didn't make a dollar for 9 months, but I was doing the math and I was like, soon I'll turn on, you know, paid subscriptions and if I get a 5% conversion, then at least I'll like maybe be able to pay for rent and food and like hopefully insurance if things go like really really really well. And then one thing led to another and here we are.

The reason to take David's course was I wasn't writing. I liked writing. I had maybe like I had a couple of Medium posts like maybe published maybe kind of just you know in Google Docs somewhere. I had written I was a philosophy minor in college so I wrote a little bit for that and did well there. In high school I liked you know being the class clown but like writing well enough that I could still get an A even if it was like a little bit of a satirical piece. And so like there was something there but I was never a writer. I took the course because I saw a tweet and I had said the word innumerate in one of our exec meetings and I got looked at like I had seven heads and got laughed at and I was like well if I don't do something here like my brain's going to fall out of my head. And so I took his course cuz I saw a tweet like you know that next day and I was like yeah that sounds great. I'll do something just so I can keep my brain going. And I think what it was really really good for was one just confidence. Like the first day there were 50 people in the class. The first day we had to write an essay on one of our favorite you know internet writers. And so I wrote something on Ben Thompson's work and David called it out as the best piece in the class. And I was like, whoa, I might actually be a writer. This is really cool. And the other thing was just showing up every week and having to write something, but then having to get it edited by your kind of like small group. And if you were the one who showed up with nothing, like then, you know, you couldn't really contribute to the group. You'd break out in small groups on Zoom. And so that was really helpful. And then he had a few, I think, really helpful concepts. The most helpful of which was the idea of a personal monopoly, which sounds like cheesier than it is, but it's really just like pick a bunch of your different interests and like overlap them until you find something that you're the only person in the world who's going to be good at writing or you'll be the best at writing about that thing. And so I went from being like, how am I going to write about tech when like Ben Thompson exists to going if I combine tech and pop culture? And so I like wrote stuff about, you know, the Mickey Mouse Club and Joseph Trumpeter. And then maybe like a little bit of Philly sports, like there's nobody at that overlap. I can win that overlap. And so I started from there and it was like very on the nose in the beginning, like here's this business and tech idea and here's this pop culture idea and I'm just going to combine the two of them. And I would force myself for like the first six months to write about both. That got to I mean it was like picking two essays, but I tried to keep the tone from that as I kind of started writing a little bit more seriously.

I think a little bit the whole thing is a roller coaster like you know talking about kind of started writing about a topic that you're bound to fail X% of the time. I'm writing about startups so you're going to be wrong a large percentage of the time just naturally but you don't have the upside that you would in a venture portfolio because like you're not going to get a thousandx on your essay. And I was doing it as a new writer on the internet very publicly because it started growing kind of in the beginning. So I think I had a really fun first two years and wrote a lot of stuff that like I'm proud of but also like was totally wrong. And so I think there was more than audience capture. There was just a period for a couple of years actually where like I was just way less confident. And so I try to write about things that I thought would do well. And something changed I guess the past year and like really now where like I do not care like you know like last year I was writing I wrote 40,000 words on the electric tech stack. I wrote this piece Means and Meanings that we were talking about before which is you know more philosophical. I'm a philosophy minor you know 16 years ago. I'm no philosopher and then like kind of all manner of 33,000 words on an internet startup in Colombia. Like just kind of whatever I find the most fascinating I think that kind of comes across on the page. If I find it fascinating I'll do a better job on it and other people will too. So I think I've done largely a good job at avoiding audience capture. It was more of just a like confidence thing I would say in the middle.

So like I am still you know fascinated by crypto. I think like you know open decentralized networks are like this beautiful thing, but they also I think I underestimated because I'm this optimist like that if people see the opportunity to do bad things, they will. And like there's nothing more of an opportunity than like an open decentralized network full of money to attract the drifters. And so like stable coins are doing really really well. Bitcoin is like kind of doing, you know, in turbulence like what it's supposed to. I moved to that in my flight to safety during liberation. It's like there's a lot that I still really love about crypto, but I got fascinated by it. I was writing about it a bunch in 2021 and 2022. And when that tanked, I kind of just got, you know, beat over the head with that. There was one in particular where I had gotten on a podcast Logan Bartlett's show with Zack Weinberg when he was this was the first of a series where he just started ripping anybody who did anything related to crypto. And it was eight at night and my son had just thrown up on me and like I wiped off my shirt and got on the podcast and then Zach was like what's like one real use case for crypto and so I like pulled something out of my ass and I was like you know mortgages on the blockchain you know like something like that just was not thinking and he ripped me apart which was fine except this guy Lauron took the clip and just it went like super viral that I was this like complete idiot and it That all started happening while, you know, the throw up had turned into RSV and we were in the hospital with my son. So I was like on like sleeping on the floor of the hospital like looking at Twitter with the whole internet dunking on me and it was just like the worst possible experience. And so that was I like that was actually I think like a confidence turning point. And like not just me, I think actually like people and I don't think I'm just feeling this like I think people lost confidence like in anything that I said after that experience which at the time was like brutal and now I think it was like the greatest thing in the world cuz one I think just going through that like you realize it actually doesn't matter and people forget but then two because now like I don't know like that's the worst it's going to get on the internet and it wasn't that bad and I think like I probably was for being like such a novice investor writer like I probably did have too much hubris and like confidence in what I was writing and I think that made the writing fun and fresh. But like it is a weird experience to start as a novice on something with that much kind of visibility cuz now I feel like I'm a 10 times better investor. I probably like, you know, know what I'm talking about on the writing side and I'm a better writer. But needed to kind of go through that like you're not that hot to kind of get to this point.

I could not agree more. It was such a weird time. Like just COVID in general on the internet was weird and everything was moving so fast and I just had this belief that like I remember I can't name the company but like there was this company that was like would you like instead of doing what you're doing would you take this absolute dream job like like I couldn't have made up if you told me like make up the I wouldn't have because it would have been like too cool of a job and I was like no way cuz like next week someone's going to offer me something even cooler like that was kind of like the way that it felt I'm making myself probably sound like more of an than I was but it just like on an upward slope it like really felt like things were just like going to keep going and at some point they'd just be like do you want to be the president or something which would be a terrible job also. And so like really to get punched in the face and like really think like you know have to go back and figure out like what I cared deeply about and want to write about and invest in and all of that like greatest thing that could have possibly happened. And you know my thesis is that it's required. If you don't have scar tissue, you're probably not going to make it.

But one of the great fears is people are terrified to fail,

And what I always try to get them to understand is that's the only road to succeed.

Right. Because that's the way it works. And so it just sometimes drives me really crazy when I talk to like incredibly talented people and I'm like you should write a book or you should start a company or and they're like no people listening right now what advice would you give for that kind of person like how can you be brave and actually do it because nobody will remember.

I wouldn't even say it was from that. It was from the actually the very beginning when I started writing it. I told the story before, but like I legitimately thought if I start writing on the internet as a guy who like didn't I mean I worked at this startup that was like kind of failing at the time and now I'm like here's what I think about startups that at the very least my friends were all going to have a group chat going where they're like what is Packy doing? Is he okay? Like he went from finance to a failing startup to now he's writing a newsletter called Not Boring on the internet where he talks about the Mickey Mouse Club. Like what is going on here? And the truth is that like one people are nicer than you expect. I went to the playground this weekend with my son. I wrote a little thing on it and he sold for the first time. He made these donut hats out of Play-Doh and put tape on them and went to sell them. Was going up to grown-ups after getting over his nerves. And he afterwards I guess like like father like son just started telling me to write down the lessons that he learned. One of which was people are nicer than you expect. And so I think that is actually like that is one of them. The other is that like people just don't care. Like you have to fight for their attention. So if you're not doing good work, people just don't waste a second thinking about it. And if you are like it's only upside of course there's like the downside of getting punched in the face and all of that but I think it really it is so asymmetric the upside for the downside because it is so hard to grab people's attention positive or negative and if even if it's negative to hold their attention for more than two hours. So

Yeah. I am what I call a rational optimist, a Deutschian optimist, I guess. I had reread his I read the book when it came out, The Beginning of Infinity, and I liked it and I enjoyed it and everything, but then I reread it and I got so much more out of it the second time I read it. I did a thread on Twitter, but back then it was kind of hard to be an optimist. You were really going countercyclical.

I think I'm naturally optimistic. And I think one of the things that made 22 23 weird and made me write a piece called Optimism. Then we started this weekly dose of optimism was that things like people seem so at least like in our part of the internet.

So down in the dumps like meanwhile, you know, we have mRNA vaccines and then just like everything that's come out of that. We have now what is, you know, AI. We had tech companies that are actually going back into the physical. The people that we get to talk to every day are doing these unbelievable things that if 5% of them are right, the world is a much much better place and nobody else knows about this stuff. And so it's kind of like I'm naturally optimistic. I will look at like, you know, I think crypto is a great example. Like I'll see that and I'll see like the positives of what crypto can be like way more than I can see like what all the downsides will be. And so it's not like a purely positive thing to be that kind of optimist. Like there's rational as much as like a total dumb optimist, but that was like a real dissonance for me. Like kind of getting to see what I saw every day and having people be like the world is so bad. Like we have all these problems. Climate change this was it's crazy. It feels like people don't think climate change is going to kill us all anymore. But even just like three years ago, there was what was it the Atlantic that article like how could you possibly have kids in like a burning drowning world or something like that that I wrote a long response piece to when you talked to all these companies like in nuclear in solar in batteries that are like doing the actual work to fix the problem. And so I think my natural optimism just was met with this like gold mine of all these people who made me more and more optimistic which so I wanted to go fight the fight. Now it feels like we're just kind of like preaching to the choir because I think everyone's gotten more optimistic or not everyone everyone kind of in our world at least. But it was very weird for a little while there that people were so so pessimistic.

And that time in particular, I was feeling like you. It was like like people, you know, honestly, it's like that old Louis CK bit about having Wi-Fi on a plane, right?

But Yes.

Yeah. Everything is amazing and nobody's happy. I think was like his punch line on that one. And I that's exactly how it felt. And then you had everybody like people who were I remember listening to one All-In podcast when Chamath was like I can't believe people got so irresponsible during I was like what are you people come on. And so it was like not just the pessimism but it was like the people who led the parade were like what were you guys?

You are exhibit A my friend. And so it was just like all of that kind of combined. But I think now hopefully people are feeling more optimistic about things.

I was just going to ask you that. I'm lucky that I'm on the host side of this conversation. I think in our part of the world that's probably true. I think like there still is a lot of like you know I'll still if I say anything good about AI on the internet still you're going to get a bunch of people like are you kidding me? This is like the worst thing in the world. It's going to kill the planet. It's going to you know I can't believe you would even use this like blah blah blah blah blah. And so I think there are plenty of people who are still pessimistic and rightly so. And you know the job market can be tough for young people. I think it's our part of the world and that's the part of the world that I know best kind of you know tech and VC. But I think in our part of the world like you get punched in the mouth enough a few times in a row like there was COVID everything was going to fall apart and then it did really well and then 2022 23 happened and then we're saved by AI and then like you look around it just again all the things that are happening right now like I saw Mario Gabriel did a podcast with the founder of Reflect Orbital today. So now we have satellites that are going to reflect the sun's beams onto solar farms to keep solar farms operating 24/7. And all this stuff is like actually really happening. In the past week, the DOE and NASA said that we're going to put nuclear reactors on the moon and then a company said that we're going to put hotels on the moon and like probably neither is going to happen on the expected timeline, but like the fact that we're actually talking about these things as like plausible things is absolutely amazing. What's happening in medicine is unbelievable. Like Ozempic and the like are miracle drugs. My friend who used to work with me, Elliot Hersburg, wrote a piece on the GitLab founder yesterday and his attempt to cure cancer like he had he was diagnosed with cancer. He's this like great systems thinker and he'd kind of gotten to the end of the line and they're like, "Sorry bud, this is the end of the line." And he's like, "Well, that stinks." Like that's not how I want this to end. And so he kind of just flew around the world and came up with like all of these different, you know, ways to test himself and do different trials on himself. And because he had a ton of money, he was able to like be this end of one character who could go figure it out and went into remission and like actually beat this like incurable cancer. And Elliot's point was like the thing that this guy is doing is this like very bespoke thing that only one rich person can do today. This is going to be accessible to all of us very very soon. You know, maybe 20 years. And you know, medicine that takes a while to change, but like that is incredible if we're getting to the spot where one, you know, early detection of cancer really really helps. But then two, we have a bunch of therapeutics that are coming to market that could help just beat it once and for all. Like it's pretty hard to be too bummed right now if like that's the soup that you're swimming in. Not to mention, it's just like I think the amount of fun people are having impacts their pessimism or optimism. Like it's really fun to wake up every morning and be like, "All right, assistant. Go do exactly what I want you to do, and then I'm going to go focus on the thing that I want to focus on." Like kind of the thing that even a couple of years ago, we were all saying, which is like the AI will do the stuff that you don't want to do, and then you'll do the stuff that you want. Like actually, for the first time right now, I kind of feel that where I just get to like think about what I want to write about and write while I have this research assistant doing all this stuff for me. And it's just a really fun time to be doing this. And so hopefully, you know, I think the big important thing will be whether the benefits of all this diffuse and like how quickly we can get all this tech that we're excited about at the early stages benefiting actual people. But there's just so much cool stuff coming down the pike that I think for at least for our world, it's hard to be too pessimistic right now.

Yeah. You know, I was saying on the drive-in when I was 11 years old, like literally women couldn't get credit cards without their husband's signature. My oldest sister, who unfortunately died, was married to a black guy from Trinidad. Their marriage was illegal in half of the states of the United States. I mean, really, seriously messed up.

And people who lack that context really can't see how much forward progress we as a society have made. And when you know all of that, right? And then you

See, in just like 50 years, the changes that America — I mean, I would be hard-pressed to find other societies that changed, I think directionally in a good way, as quickly as the United States. And so context, I think, is super important. But I also think that, you know, you're talking about the AI, and so we have our own AI hardware software installation. And we have a genius who's programming it. You're going to see some pretty cool things come out commercially ultimately from our AI lab. So, one of the things I had the AI lab do was go through every innovation and find out the reaction to it. And there's a thing called a pattern, which is a primitive pattern, right? That if you can extrapolate from that pattern, you can see really cool things. The pattern for innovation is like unchallenged.

Go all the way back to writing. Socrates said no, that's a bad idea. And it follows the same pattern, right? So what happens, and the reason it happens in my opinion, is let's take photography. When photography came on the scene, painters of portraits were really unhappy.

Right. And so but it happens for novels, it happened for photography, music. When records came out, symphony orchestras took full-page ads out in newspapers saying that's not real music. Real music you have to hear live. Right? So what's really happening is the prior regime that was really, really good at that particular skill gets nuked by an innovation.

And like they're unhappy about that and they start coming up with every kind of reason. One of the ones that's really interesting is they shift from outcome, right? Like, so how should you judge a book or a piece of writing or a movie or whatever? Well, what did you get out of it? Did you enjoy it? Was it a good story? Did you learn something? Did you change your mind about something? Right? The outcome was what was important. What happens, and it happened across all of these innovations, they change the playing field and they stop talking about outcomes and they start talking about process, right? And well, no, if you're using AI, which by the way we use in every aspect of our ventures, and which I'm using in concert with my human writers, like I literally could not be writing this fiction book without AI.

Because the research alone, it would take me, I would have to hire hundreds of people and let them loose in libraries all around the world, and it just wouldn't get done. You know what, that just made me think of, it does take away, like the thing I was saying about how it frees you up to do the creative work. For a lot of people, I think that's uncomfortable, to be freed up to do the creative work. That is the hard part of this whole thing, and it is really comfortable to say, I can't get my book out because I have to go to this library, and you can sit in the library for hours and you're working on your book, and so you feel like you're doing this really amazing productive thing, and it I guess prevents you from doing the hard work of actually sitting there and thinking about what you want to write about and the questions that you'd want to ask AI and the research that you wanted to do when you have to move faster yourself. And so like I'm sure a lot of this is just, I mean, people are bad at change, right? And so like they're used to doing something one way. Their identity tied to one thing, and we're bad at change.

Yeah. They lobbied Congress. They did every, I think the guy's name was Valente, and you would see him everywhere on the news like, this is piracy. This is not the way movies were meant to be watched. They're meant to be watched in a theater. And it was a big huge thing until they're like, oh, we might actually be able to make a buck on this. And then of course you look at their revenue streams, they're making so much more money because of the innovation, right?

And it's interesting because if you know about how things get innovated and found, like I was just reading this great book, The Story of Money, and the piece on Gutenberg is amazing. So Gutenberg was basically a grifter. He was a jeweler. He was obsessed with striking it rich, right? And he not only was a jeweler, he grew up in wine country. And so wine presses, he was looking at those. The problem with printing before Gutenberg was people had come up with stuff, right? But they could never give uniform pressure when they published it down to the ink. And so it smeared all over the place. And everyone thought, this is awful, this is horrible. And he figured, no, no, no. Because he was a jeweler, he could do the fonts much, much better because that's what he was trained to do. And then he figured out the way to make the pressure thing.

But do you know why he did it? Because he wanted to get rich. And literally the only game in town was the Catholic Church. And so back then, this is such a great story. Back then, the church was making bank on so-called letters of indulgence. Basically, they were selling you heaven tickets. It's amazing. It's amazing.

But there were so many people who wanted them. There was a supply-demand mismatch because all of them were done by a scribe with a quill with the fancy letters and calligraphy and everything and then signed by the bishop, right? So even though there was a demand for a hundred of these letters, they could only produce ten. And so Gutenberg goes to the local bishop and shows him a printed letter of indulgence. And the bishop almost wets himself. Where do I sign up? They finance him. He gets all the financing from the Catholic Church, which by the way was also the lender of choice back then. And the bishop is thrilled. He loves it.

But Gutenberg is like, no, I got to do more. And his eyes set on Pope Pius V. Pius. He had kids in different countries. He wrote erotica. Yes. And he was also incredibly vain. And because he wrote so much, his eyesight started to go. And the thought of having to wear glasses to read to a congregation really offended his vanity. So Gutenberg did a Bible just for Pope Pius. It was beautiful. Being a jeweler, the cover of the Bible was all encrusted with beautiful jewels. But when you opened it up, the fonts were this big so that he could read it without glasses on.

And Pius was like, where do I sign? And so literally, they gave him all the financing. But they didn't think, because they thought, this is amazing. We're going to get 100x the revenue from the letters of indulgence. We're going to get these beautiful Bibles. But he forgot that there were other people who might use the printing press too.

Enter Martin Luther. But even that, Luther came from mining country and they were in a huge bear market. His whole family was in it. And so he got triggered when the pope sent the prelates and everything to his town to raise money for the beautification of the Vatican. And they're all in these incredibly fine robes and everything. Meanwhile, Luther's family is starving and he's like, fuck that. And thus, you got the thesis nailed to the church wall.

I didn't either. Did he get rich?

And what's really fascinating about it is the real history is so much more interesting than what we've been taught, right? Before reading this, I always thought of Gutenberg as this very studious academic type guy. No, I also picture everybody from history as old, almost.

But like the second order effects of publishing created like everything. And it gave us the ability for the first time in history to time-bind our ideas and send them forward into history, and like the profound changes of that. But then again, like the book I'm reading is The History of Money, right? In The Story of Money. And what was another reason Lutheranism and Protestantism took hold? Well, because like Germany was a confederacy of duchies. It was not a unified country and they were all competing with each other. That's why it took hold there, because as the author of the book points out, the Chinese had already figured out printing. But because they were centralized under the god-king of the emperor, they squashed it. They didn't want ideas that were not supported by the emperor to get out there. In Germany, it was like the Wild West and so all of them could get out. Pamphlets got huge.

The thing about Martin Luther, he was like literally one of the bestselling authors of all time at that time, but it was all pamphlets. And the key thing was the priesthood spoke Latin. And I always joke that the priesthood says the incantations in Latin because they don't want the laity to know what they're on about. And Luther published in German. It was the first time ever. And so like most people were illiterate, right? And so the pamphlets were meant to be read in the town square and they were. And then he published like hundreds of thousands of these pamphlets and they made their way all across all of the city-states of Germany. And then the princes of those states were like, you know, if I convert to this new form of Christianity, I can seize all of the church's lands. It's, you know, follow the money.

And so they're like, yes, please. I mean, Henry VIII, yeah, he wanted to get married a couple of times, but the thought just had him salivating that I can seize all of the church's lands if I convert. And, you know, Protestantism is born.

We are. Humans are really amazing.

I mean, like, yeah, the fact that so much innovation comes from greed and war is like a very weird feature of humanity.

Yeah, the money.

Florence minted the florin and created the world's first reserve currency because it was, you know, 25 karat gold, always uniform. It was done by merchants, right? Church was very unhappy about that. But they literally became the world's reserve currency because of liquidity. And that's what created the Renaissance, was the ability to trade in your own currency.

Because like literally the US dollar gives us inordinate privileges and like crazy privileges. When the world uses your currency to price all of the other goods, you have advantages that simply don't exist for other things. And the same thing happened over in Florence.

So one of the ideas that I think somebody like you should explore, there is so much alpha sitting in history books. When you start seeing like these connections, and this was new for me, like I had heard about it earlier but that's why I picked up the book, and like reading it I'm like, this is amazing. And you know I learned that like Fibonacci, his real name was Leonardo, Leonardo of Pisa I think, he wrote the first best-selling business book.

Yeah. And it was written for merchants and it basically defined the time value of money. And it was the book that made lending take off that took it away from the church.