Packy, thank you so much for joining Scaling Laws. So, you've got a newsletter, Not Boring, that reaches nearly a quarter of a million people. And if I have my McCormick history right, when you started, you had a mighty following of just 20 or so followers, all as a part of some assignment. What was it about your writing that you think drew such an impressive and massive audience from 20 to, you know, 100x?
Yeah, I mean the growth is easy when you're starting off a small base, so there's that. I think there's a few things. One, I got very lucky with the timing, starting to write this in COVID when I had infinite time and when people had infinite time to read really long things. I think from the very beginning, and this is just kind of who I am, but in a period where a lot of people were not feeling optimistic, there was this optimistic tone to the newsletter. One of the first pieces I wrote was talking about how all the layoffs in COVID were actually a good thing because there are a lot of people stuck in jobs inside of companies and this shook things up a little bit. I don't know that that was right or wrong, but just seeing the silver lining in things resonated with people then. And I think now what people come to Not Boring for is, I'm not the smartest person on the internet, but I will research the hell out of whatever I'm writing about. I wrote this 40,000-word piece on the electric stack recently and I spent a month just in full research mode going after this thing. I almost view myself as the person who can do all the research that they don't have time to do. And because I'm right at that level of intelligence where I'm not smart enough that I know anything going into it, I'm almost describing as I learn what I'm learning, and so hopefully it's approachable to people who want to learn alongside me but who are not afraid of going pretty deep.
Well, this isn't meant to be a therapy session, but just to turn it into one briefly, what drives you to do that level of research? I mean, admittedly, and this will come as no surprise to people who know my work, I tend to be a kind of quantity versus quality guy because I want to throw my ideas out there. I love the rapid reaction. I want to see what happens. And that's my love language from a writing perspective. I love to see what ideas grapple with folks. What is it that drives you to say, you know what, I'm going to spend the next month learning everything about the electricity stack and let's see what happens.
Some of it, I think, is the inability to kill my darlings. I'm sure there's a version of that quote where I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time. I think there's probably something to that here. But I think part of it is I do just want to understand the things that I'm writing about. I didn't plan to spend a month researching the electric stack, but I would get in there and I'd be like, how exactly do wires and magnets make a motor? And so then you have to go through that and it's like what's the history of getting here and it just ends up being this kind of snowball. As I'm writing you end up finding out all these fascinating stories of all these people throughout history and so then you got to throw those in and it humanizes it a little bit. None of it's really intentional. It's just that's how much work it takes for me to actually understand a thing, and so that's how long the piece ends up being.
And from a sort of cause prioritization perspective, obviously there's a lot we can write about these days and with the benefits of AI, you can find new topics to dive into, new histories to explore, new things to translate even to uncover new insights and so on and so forth. What is your metric or framework for saying, you know what, this is going to be worth my time. This is what I want to add to Not Boring because it's going to have X impact or it's going to reach Y audience. How do you factor that in or is it just kind of hunches and gut checks?
Hunches and gut checks. A lot of it is whatever I find the most fascinating. I've learned that I need to do things that I really want to learn about myself because if not you're just never going to spend a month researching the thing and going to the depth that I like to go to. A lot of it is just what do I want to know more about, what do I think is important that people haven't covered at least the way that I'm going to be covering it. I've written a lot less about AI now because I don't think it's fascinating, just because so many people are talking about it and I don't have anything particularly new to add. But I do get to talk to a lot of really smart people building things, particularly in the physical world. A lot of it is I get little whispers from those conversations and then I dive in on the things that I find exciting. Frankly, if I thought more about audience or growth, I wouldn't be writing about the things that I'm writing about probably. I've written a few pieces on the return of magic and this whole weird thing about telepathy and ancient religions, or Means and Meaning, which is a survey of modern philosophers and their view on capitalism and capitalism being blamed for our unhappiness essentially is the question. I think capitalism does one thing and then it's up to us to find our meaning. The Means and Meaning framework is something I'm trying to apply more. What are the things that are going to give us the means with which to live longer, more abundant lives, but then also when we get there, how do we not be the character in Wall-E who's sitting in the thing and just staring at the screen? I do think there actually is a tension between abundance and meaning because you have to struggle for less. How do you get the best of both worlds is the question we're trying to answer.
Yeah, I love that because I was just speaking in an earlier episode with Brent Orrell of AEI and his whole answer to the question of what do we do in the age of AI is go meander, go explore and you should be guided by the question of what problem do you want to solve. I think that's such a powerful framing of just saying I have some purpose here on Earth and not enough people have that. And I think your perspective of saying I'm going to use my gut and my hunches to supply this information gap is so cool. In the same way that I'd say I'm motivated by trying to push people's boundaries by considering different ideas. You being able to target that deep niche area that we need to explore is wonderfully exciting and one of the many reasons why I'm not worried that AI is going to destroy our capacity to be creative and to find new lanes to dive into. But with that in mind, I kind of want to pull our priors and pull our shared affiliation out and get it out there as soon as possible. So both you and I are in one way or another affiliated with the Abundance Institute. And if anyone goes and gives the Abundance Institute a Google, you're literally going to see that they say they're optimistic about the future. And I was being interviewed, I forget, for some random radio station, and they called me out, why be optimistic? This is not the age of optimism. We've got this conflict, we've got this displacement, we've got this question. So I want you to do my job for me and defend optimism. What is the case for optimism? And is it just something that we need to have some fixed percentage of the population be optimistic at all times and you're doing a civic duty on behalf of the rest of us? Or what is it about optimism that matters?
I think there's a couple of different things about it. One, I just think it's almost like you'd rather be long the S&P 500 over decades versus short the S&P 500. If you look at the charts, things are getting better and there were always conflicts and they probably weren't on our phone screen and on the news 24/7 before and so it probably feels worse now than it felt in the past when you just were blissfully unaware of those things happening. But things actually are getting better. It's just very weird to me that pessimism is the default. There's the now very obvious quote that pessimists sound smart and optimists make money. I'm okay sounding like a Pollyannish dumbass for a while saying things are actually fine even though I know that makes me sound less sophisticated and I'm totally okay with that. Two, I don't have a choice. My brain is just kind of naturally wired this way. But three, I really believe the camp that says optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's this great blog post, a lot of people have written about this topic in one way or another. I think the book Boom by Burn Hobart and Tobias Huber made this case a little bit as well. But there was actually a great blog post by Alex Wang who's now at Facebook Meta AI, he sold Scale AI to them, talking about when their team sets internal goals that are more optimistic they get stuff done more quickly and they believe they can get it done. They don't wait till the last minute. If you think that you can do something you're more likely to. It's not guaranteed. And if you think that you can't or that it'll take a very long time, just almost definitionally you're not going to be able to do that thing. Even if optimism was incorrect and things were getting worse, still the right default mindset is to be optimistic.
Yeah. And this stands out in particular for the sort of moonshots we often talk about. And now moonshots in my opinion, it's kind of like referring to Costco hot dogs. It's just kind of boring. It's like, yeah, it's cool, but everyone has a moonshot these days. Who cares? That when you think about the literal moonshot and you go back to 1961 when JFK gives his original speech that says we're going to go to the moon within a decade and you poll the American public they actually say yeah no thanks, cool beans you do you but we're not really on board for this. So there's this sort of push that we do have to set those ambitious goals not only personally but nationally. And I bet this also is probably a product that I want to hear from you on is getting to talk to founders. Not Boring does an excellent job of telling the stories of the most ambitious and complex startups. You don't meet pessimistic founders.
No, it would be a very weird pitch of yeah, I'm probably not going to do too hot. I can't find talent. My idea is kind of whatever but we'll see. Fingers crossed. Thousand percent. I'll come back to that in one second. To your point on the moon landing, I think this is still a conversation that we have which is why do we need to go to space? Why are billionaires going to space? If you look at the list of inventions that have been created that are good for humanity, everything from the space blanket is an obvious example, but the list is ridiculously long and includes things that you would never expect. Things like the contact lens that might not actually be true, but things like that that you wouldn't think are associated with going to space. The cool thing there beyond just the national pride is that you're having to design for the most extreme environment that you can possibly design for and cost is not an issue. It actually allows you to just design. It's almost like working with the department of war or whatever where capabilities matter more than costs. And so you can design these things that are maybe a decade or two into the future because you have to without as much concern about cost and to contemplate extreme environments design these futuristic things to make it work. That one always bugs me. Why are we going to space? Aside from the fact that it's incredibly cool, even if you don't believe that humans need to be multiplanetary, I do love the framing of spreading knowledge and intelligence and human wisdom through the universe. But even without any of that, it's practically good for Earth in a way that we wouldn't have come up with a lot of the things without that.
Yeah. And to that point, just briefly, number one, I would love to see more marathon runners when they finish thank JFK for their space blanket. That would be great. But also it's funny how this is now becoming almost a field of study. When you talk to people who are analyzing the study of progress or the science of progress or you talk to folks in meta-science like Caleb Watney and the idea of having golden tickets, this is all about punches of saying hey we're a granting organization we have no reason why we're sure this is going to be a project we should bet but we're going to do it anyway because who knows what could come about.
I was having this conversation this morning. This is one of the things I really like about venture and about media is that they're both the types of organizations that can capture value from hunch and intuition experimentation where you try a bunch of things that could be good for the world or that could be really interesting and you don't know exactly how they're going to translate into value but you have this mechanism to capture it if it does. One of my soap boxes is that management fees should get, venture firms should get a lot more creative with what they do with their management fees because you can do a bunch of really pro-ecosystem stuff that comes back and benefits you. I could not agree with that more. To your earlier question about founders, that's half the reason I started writing explicitly about optimism. I always had the angle of optimism, but there was a period in late 2022, early 2023 when the market had crashed and everyone was like well everything is just absolutely terrible. The discount rate on belief also compresses when interest rates go up or something, if you have to discount cash flows back you also discount belief in some sense. But at the same time, I was talking to a bunch of these founders who are building nuclear reactors or putting batteries on houses or building supersonic planes or doing all of this crazy stuff and there's this real, I feel a real privilege to be able to get my dose from these people whenever I talk to them. It's a privilege that a few people who get to talk to these people all the time have. Hopefully those stories are getting more and more out there not just from me but from a lot of people, but a lot of people just don't get that experience of talking nitty-gritty with the people who are building these companies and understanding that they're making a real calculated bet that they think this crazy thing that they want to do is actually likely enough to start a company around and if 10% of that stuff comes true the world is a better place. That is a big reason that I started writing the way that I do, just to put more of that good stuff out into the world so it's not just in these private conversations.
Yeah. And it's funny because there's a real public policy consequence of this perspective. When I talk to folks right now about AI and job displacement, for example, commonly what I hear about is, you know, my son or my daughter, they've applied to a thousand jobs and AI is just spitting them out and rejecting them and they don't talk to anyone and we need to get AI out of this job sorting process and so on and so forth. And I just kind of stop them and say, so let's get back to the problem. Your son or daughter doesn't have a job. What's the solution? Let's create more jobs. That is what we should be talking about. Yes, there are conversations to be had about how AI tools may or may not foster discrimination in a manner that is greater or lesser than human reviewers. That's another podcast. We'll get to that in another day, I'm sure. But just the question of how can we turn this into an optimistic vision of things doesn't get asked enough unless you're sort of in this optimistic space.
I mean, you've anticipated the topics of one of my essays, and I've touched on this a little bit before, but I actually almost fell for the pessimism on the job front too, where the steelman for this case is we all believe that new jobs will be created and it'll be this bonanza and we'll all be like nuclear fusion reactor repairmen or something in the future and things will be totally good. But in the short term, the thing that worried me was AI will be good enough to replace the junior people. It won't get good enough to replace the senior people. And then we have this weird gap of people who would have been trained otherwise who don't get trained and can't become senior people. And the job numbers kind of support that it's not a great time to be a new college grad. What this misses, what I missed are a couple of things that I think are actually, I think it's going to be a bonanza time to be a curious person. You have to be good at this stuff. You can't just lazily wait and hope that someone is now looking for a guy to do very easy jobs, those are probably going to be harder to come by actually. But for young people who, at least if you like video games and you like playing with new AI stuff, just as much, for those type of people I actually think the way that this works is, I have a couple people on my team who are 20 years old. I'm not a coder, but I can use Claude to tell me to make something or whatever. The comparative advantage belongs to them though. It is much easier for me to say, hey here's a general idea that I have, could you go make this really quickly? And because they know what they're doing and because they've spent time with the tools and because frankly they don't have two kids at home and they have more time to just mess around all weekend learning these new tools, they have an advantage over me that doesn't disappear as long as the technology is changing fast enough that it makes sense to be young and on the cutting edge. The other is W. Brian Arthur at the Santa Fe Institute writes about in his book The Nature of Technology the idea that for a big enough technological shift the whole economy rearranges itself around the new technology. People can very easily predict, oh my son was going to be a data entry person at a financial shop or whatever and that job goes away so what are they going to do now. And I don't think they anticipate there's maybe these weird structures where now I actually want to hire 20 more young people because they're so much more productive because they know the tools. I have interesting ideas. They also are learning and have interest. These two guys are not just doing stuff that I tell them to do. They've come up with a whole to-be-announced line of the business that didn't exist and that I never would have thought of and they just got their foot in the door by being good at the tools. Companies will look different and jobs will look different, but young people will always have this advantage as long as the tools are evolving, which it feels like they're doing faster and faster. I think we're probably in an uncomfortable couple year period before it reshapes itself.
Yeah, these transitions are always difficult and we haven't always managed them well. We can look at globalization. We can tell the story of entire regions that were really neglected and based off of the promise that maybe never came true in their particular instance of, oh, the future's going to be brighter for you, they're still waiting for that brighter future in a lot of communities. And so, how do we actually make that a better transition is a huge and important question.
But for me, I think a lot of this boils down to as you were describing some of your employees and some of the folks you get to talk with as you're looking for investment opportunities. Can you find high agency people?
And this isn't meant to say it's all on you and you have to do everything and so on and so forth, but pulling yourself up by the bootstraps used to be a thing that we kind of celebrated as a part of our American ethos.
And now when I read, and just to bring it back to the media context in particular, when I read articles by certain outlets and from certain newsletters, it's here's how AI is happening to you. Here's how this thing is stealing your X and Y. Here's how your attention is being stolen. And all of it is passive. All of it is just, hey, you know what? You're sitting back. You're doing your thing. And this poor assault of technology. There's nothing you can do about it. So on and so forth. And so in both contexts, I think we're seeing this passive narrative be pounded into people. Whereas if you find those high agency people, it's amazing how much you can accomplish and how quickly you can do it.
Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different things that come to mind. One is I am too addicted to my phone and I try to stop checking Twitter in the morning and when I don't check Twitter in the morning my brain just works better and so I think there is weapons grade stuff, there are people smarter than me and a lot of them figuring out how to get me to keep checking my phone.
Great, because I do think like there is I don't think that's good. And I think even a lot of the way that I use AI and I'm just like talking personally is like I don't know eating like low-fat ice cream back in the day when people thought that was healthy where it's like actually this is really good because I'm talking to my AI and so like I must be doing something productive and it's actually just like really not productive. A lot of the stuff that I do with AI it's like kind of just wasting time in a smarter way. And so I think there are real arguments on that side of things. None of it is an excuse not to like go out and do the thing that you want to do. I love the framing that you brought up earlier about like there's never been a better time to like go solve the problem that you want to go solve, but there are real things that you need to like fight against. I love the David Foster Wallace quote that I put in a piece that he talks about like really like and this was early email like needing to build up defenses in our gut against the things that were going to happen just like kind of naturally as technology evolved and I think we like actually do. But at the same time like it is a very good time if you have that goal and a bit of agency. I think that's true.
There was a great piece that came out recently in Hypertext from the Niskanen Center and Brink Lindsay frame this idea of a sort of modern-day temperance movement for our consumption of media. And what I love about it is it's not saying, "Hey, we need some state government to say you can only use this for an hour or you can only read these sources." But instead, what if we as individuals collectively acknowledged, hey, it's not really fun when you go home for Thanksgiving and everyone's just on their phones constantly. Maybe let's not do that, right? Like totally cultural question and that's a norms question that we can have real movement and real conversation around and I think your work sharing these stories and sharing the people who are high agency for lack of a better phrase hopefully sets a better example of how people should be spending their time.
I hope so. I mean I write that stuff and I'm still, you know, too tied to my phone but I agree. I mean, I think part of it too is like, you know, there's just been a century or a half century of like everything being focused on the digital side of the house. And so I'm just like really excited about what happens when a lot of this innovation is now like going back into the physical side of the house. And I think like part of this is just like the real world needs to, you know, compete in some ways for people's attention. I think there's, you know, a lot that society to your point needs to solve that will not be solved by technology. But I would not be surprised if we see like, you know, a big religious and spiritual revival and like all sorts of things where like they have technology to make you be present with your loved ones and to like think and reflect and do all of those things that are probably pretty healthy for humans to do. And so I just think the reactions are going to be like super interesting. That's I think the thing that pessimists probably get wrong and maybe, you know, optimists get wrong too but is like just second and third order effects are just like really really really hard to predict but are like, you know, almost clockwork in their ability to show up. So it'll be fun to see what those are.
Yeah. And I think that does get all the way back to the start of our conversation of just having a purpose and inspiring people to have that purpose of a problem to solve. That's always going to keep you busy and that's only always going to give you a reason to be doing something other than wasting your time in a smarter fashion which I love. I may steal that from you at some point. So you come across a lot of folks with big ideas and a lot of optimists and I feel like you probably have come to a pretty nuanced perspective of AI. So, you know, let's imagine someone sends you a pitch deck. Slide two is we use AI to do X, Y, and Z. What's your initial reaction and just what is your current understanding of AI? Where do you land on the I'm so bullish, this is it, we finally did it and this is the future of technology versus my P(doom) is 75% and my kids have doom prepped for everything.
Yeah. I wrote a piece a while back called the Goldilocks Zone that I actually think still holds up really really well. Which is like it's not going to kill us and it's not going to save us and it is like this super software. It's like a super SaaS. And I drew this picture of like a stick figure of this really really really smart teenager who just like lies in bed listlessly and like doesn't do anything unless you ask and then it answers questions. I know that you can now tell Claude or whatever to go read your email. It doesn't feel like it has, you know, agency in the way that we would define it. It doesn't feel like it has goals of its own. I know you can prompt it to tell you about its inner feelings. I don't think there's much going on there. I don't know. I think it's like a really useful tool. And so that's I have like the most it's like a very boring take on it.
