The Tim Ferriss Show - #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter

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Starting point is 00:02:57 that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. if the spirit moves you. Hello boys and girls, damas y caballeros. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the tactics, habits, routines, and so on that you can use. I am recording this intro at a Mexican airport after a top secret retreat doing top secret things and maybe I'll talk more about that sometime. But this episode you're going to hear is with this intro at a Mexican airport after a top secret retreat doing top secret things. And maybe I'll talk more about that sometime. But this episode you're going to hear is with one of my favorite people, Tim O'Reilly. And I recorded this some time ago and held on to it like a piece of gold to my chest to release at the right time. At Tim O'Reilly on Twitter. It's one of the most fascinating polymaths and autodidacts, one of the most curious minds I've ever encountered.

Starting point is 00:03:47 He's been called the trend spotter in the world of tech and certainly involving wider macro trends. He's been called the Oracle of Silicon Valley. He is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc. His original business plan was pretty simple. Interesting work for interesting people, and that's worked out pretty well. He's generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue doing many, many different things. O'Reilly Media delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, urges companies to create more value than they capture,

Starting point is 00:04:15 and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. But as he would say himself, one of my favorite quotes of his, sorry for the noise, this is some audio verite for all of you guys. But he would say, quote, money in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. And we talk quite a bit about that. Tim has an incredible history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. In 93, that's 1993 for you youngins, he launched the first

Starting point is 00:04:46 commercial website. That was very Sean Connery, the first commercial website. And then in 98, he organized the meeting where the term open source. I've been speaking too much Castellano, my English is not happening. Open source software, my God. Let's try that again. He organized the meeting where the term open source. I swear to God, I'm not drunk, guys. Open source software was agreed on and helped the business world understand its importance. In 2004, with the Web 2.0 summit, he defined how Web 2.0 represented not only the resurgence of the web after the dot-com bust, but an entirely new model for the computer industry based on big data, collective intelligence, and the internet as a platform.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Web 2.0 is actually one of the conferences where the four-hour workweek reached its tipping point. So also thank you to Tim for that. In 2009, with his Gov 2.0 summit, he framed a conversation around the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawn initiatives at the federal, state, and local level and all around the world. He has now turned his attention and is very focused on artificial intelligence, the implications of artificial intelligence, the on-demand economy, and other technologies

Starting point is 00:05:59 that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world. He really has both a 30,000-foot view of the larger shifts, the tectonic shifts that will produce changes in 10, 20, 30 years, but is also on the ground and really in touch with the people who are shaping the details of how that will come to pass. And his brand new book, which I encourage everybody to check out, is WTF, What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. And I will link to all of that in the show notes, of course. And if you liked Kevin Kelly, he is a bird of a feather with this fine gent, Tim O'Reilly. So without further ado, please enjoy this very wide-ranging, extremely, for me certainly, enjoyable conversation with Tim O'Reilly. So without further ado, please enjoy this very wide-ranging, extremely, for me certainly, enjoyable conversation with Tim O'Reilly.

Starting point is 00:06:52 Tim, welcome to the show. Thank you for making the time. Well, thanks for having me. I have been looking forward to this for some time, and most recently your name came up because I was in a car in the back mountains surrounding part of Uzbekistan with Kevin Kelly. And our friend Kevin Kelly, on a very short list when I asked him, who do you think I should absolutely have on the podcast? Tim O'Reilly was one of the names that came up. So I also leaned on Kevin for some deep intel and suggested topics and questions. But I thought I would start with what's on everyone's

Starting point is 00:07:31 mind, which is, why are you similar to Cookie Monster? Yes. Well, I often joke about myself as a VC and a business person that I'm a little bit like the – some episode I remember from when my kids were little on Cookie Monster. I may not have this completely right, but he's on a game show and he has to pick his prize. And behind door number one is a million dollars and they tell him that. Behind door number two is a chateau in France. And behind door number three is a million dollars. And they tell them that. Behind door number two is a chateau in France. And behind door number three is a cookie. And of course, everybody knows what he picks. And what I like to say about myself is that I always go for the cookie. Because in some sense, what I really care about, what's my cookie, is finding people

Starting point is 00:08:23 who are doing something new and interesting that I think other people want to know about and that they can learn from. And my whole business has been built around finding people who have cookies and then sharing it with the world. So not to take the cookie monster discussion too far, but you didn't know this. I happen to be standing in a house where seasons 1 through 10 of Sesame Street were partly written. So many of the characters, including Cookie Monster, were actually written where I am standing. So it's come full circle. And when I bought the house, they were going to throw everything out, the former owners, including a season one staff jacket for Sesame Street, which of course I kept. And that is hanging in the doorway. ideas. And we'll certainly spend a lot of time talking about publishing and many things that are

Starting point is 00:09:26 perhaps a little more recent in your life. But I wanted to rewind the clock a bit. And to start maybe with an odd story. Could you tell me about how your father, who my understanding was a neurologist, also deeply religious, injected radioactive copper isotopes into your arm. Is that a true story? It's absolutely true. So tell me, I need some more context on that. Actually, it wasn't my dad who injected them. It was a guy named Leroy Shipley. He was the lab tech. And oh my God, he was amazing. He was very funny. But I was, my best friend and I,

Starting point is 00:10:05 and my best friend's sisters when I was 14, the girls were a little older, agreed to participate in a study of Wilson's disease, which is a disease of the abnormal retention of copper in the body. It's a genetic disease. My dad was sort of a pioneer in early genetic medicine, also radiomedicine. And Wilson's disease was one of his specialties. And so they

Starting point is 00:10:32 needed to have control subjects to understand how copper is excreted normally. And so they would inject us with radioactive copper. And then every day we went in and lay in this room with, it was massive thing, you know, it wasn't like today's MRIs, but it was just this whole room that was called a whole body counter. And they kind of traced where the copper went. And it accumulates in the liver and then in the brain of people with Wilson's disease. And it's normally excreted after about, you know, some relatively small amount of time. So it was copper 64. It's got a half-life of a few weeks. And so I presumably it was all gone. But if I ever come down with

Starting point is 00:11:12 liver cancer, I may have my father to blame. But we did, we actually did it twice. But, and again, he obviously took some thought about whether it was safe because once we became lab rats for him, there were other researchers who wanted us to do other experiments. And he, you know, said, no, I don't want you to do that one. That doesn't seem right to me. So he, of course, used himself as a guinea pig for his experiments. What did your mother do? I mean, you had, as I understand it, let's see, seven children total in the family. That's correct. What did your, I mean, that's certainly a full-time job just to take care of the kids, but what did your mom spend her time doing primarily? You know, I think taking

Starting point is 00:11:58 care of seven kids is huge. I still remember her. One of my memories of my mom is her on her hands and knees in the bathroom scrubbing the toilet. And she looks up and says, life is not a bowl of cherries. But of course, the idea of my mom like that brings up another great story about the time that she likes to tell. She was apparently, you know, up on a piano stool trying to dust a light and she fell flat on that. She fell off and was lying flat on the floor. And my brother James, who must have been eight or nine at the time, came running in from the schoolyard. We lived about a block from the school. Sees her on the floor and says, Mommy, what time is it? And she says, James, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And he goes, okay, and runs back out. And then later she said, what did you think I was doing lying on the floor? And he said, well, I don't know, maybe dusting under the piano. So she was basically, she was the old school, you know, I mean, she made every bit, I mean, you know, I kind of look back and I go, she should have made us do more of the work. You know, we had some chores, but basically she made all the beds. She, you know, you know, it was just, you know, it's a lot with seven kids. And again, of course, you know, the, the, uh, you know, I was in the

Starting point is 00:13:19 older cohort, so there were still, you know, young babies. Um, you know, and I think, um, the thing that's actually been, been such a great delight to me in my life, uh, my, my dad died very young, died at 60, uh, you know, so, and, and that's now, uh, you know, 40 years back. Um, and, uh, just, uh, my mom, um, you know, later came to travel with me. She would just come with me on my business trips. She was just such a willing, interested traveler. She was a girl from the back of the mill in Yorkshire. She grew up from a – actually, her parents and her grandparents before that were factory workers. But her dad was also a bookie, taking bets on horses back when it was illegal.

Starting point is 00:14:06 And so she always would tell us stories which for her were full of shame, but for us were full of romance of how she used to have to go collect bets from strangers in the park when she was a girl and the police would come. He'd have to light out over the back fences. So we took great delight in the thought that, that, uh, we were descended from petty criminals. Um, I mean, again, of course, by the time, you know, I was a teenager and went to visit, you know, uh, it was legal and his son actually had the business and a little betting shop. Um, but, uh, uh, it's, uh, it's a lot of fun and it actually

Starting point is 00:14:44 brings up something that's completely irrelevant, but kind of a bit of pattern recognition. You know, the fact that here was a guy who had a living doing something that was illegal. And then when it been legalized. Sorry, the head of the San Francisco Foundation was over at dinner and we're talking about various issues and he says – this is Fred Blackwell. He says, what about the weed problem? I said, what do you mean the weed problem? He says, well, there's all these people coming in now and they're making all this money selling weed. And the only people who can't participate in this new economy are all the black and brown people who have convictions on the record for selling weed, you know, and, and, you know, it's just that kind of interesting thing that we don't think about when we change the rules. What do we do about

Starting point is 00:16:06 the people who played by the old rules, the new rules? And that just kind of leads me down the path of a lot of what's broken in our society is this sort of layering of ideas that change, but they change incompletely. People have this, you know, effectively bad map of the world that doesn't work anymore. And, you know, same kind of thing. And again, a lot of the work that we do at Code for America, my wife's nonprofit, is around, you know, fixing some of these things. You know, we do a lot of work in expunging, you know, low level, you know, offenses. That's why we were talking with Fred, you know, from People's Record, they passed something called Prop 47 here in California. And there was something like 30, $40 million spent to pass this proposition.

Starting point is 00:17:01 But the implementation, nobody thought about it. And so a tiny fraction of the people who are eligible have actually done it. And the same thing we saw with the healthcare.gov failure back in 2013. You know, people pass policies and they don't actually think about how are we going to do it? How are we going to actually do this thing? You know, so right now, if you want to clear your record, you have to go get your, you know, go to the DA's office and you pick up this form and then you go somewhere else and get

Starting point is 00:17:29 it signed by someone. And, you know, these are people who don't have the time to go, you know, spend months on this process. You know, if they were going to pass this, you know, they could have thought through how are we going to make this easier for people? And a lot of the work that we – the other work we do, things like we work on improving access to food aid. And we got brought in because they didn't really understand why people were signing up and then falling off the program and then signing up again immediately. And it was just administrative stuff that people didn't know how to comply with. And they didn't have any measurement. You know, in the tech world, you know, people have gotten very used to, you know, A-B testing and measuring things and understanding, oh, this is where people are falling out of our pipeline. This is where things don't work. And a lot of what we've ended up building at Code for America are alternate pathways that are designed to teach us about what's wrong.

Starting point is 00:18:31 You know, so we're sort of – they're exploratory. Jen, my wife, Jen Palka, calls it apps to ops. You know, we're basically building apps that actually do let us follow the users. So we can say, oh, you know, here you're losing some number of people because your application takes 45 minutes to fill out. And there are people who are trying to do this in libraries where there's a 30 minute timeout and you have no mechanism for them to save their work. You know, stuff like that. Or, you know, hey, you know, you're telling people their documents are uploaded successfully, but they're not, you know, or you're sending out, you know, in some counties, they were sending out letters about people's appointments that they were supposed to make. And they would come in, they would come out, 25% of them or some significant fraction would come out after the date of the appointment.

Starting point is 00:19:23 And they didn't know it. That was the worst part. It was bad enough that of the appointment. And they didn't know it. That was the worst part. It was bad enough that it was happening. But they didn't know it. And the same thing, true, you know, we work, you know, a lot with at the federal level under Obama. Jen was deputy CTO and helped set up something called the United States Digital Service. And, you know, a lot of the problems at the VA were very similar. People would be applying from library computers, you know, homeless vets, and they couldn't get through the process. And,

Starting point is 00:19:52 you know, basically the people in Washington, you know, at the VA headquarters were saying, well, they're obviously not eligible because they're not succeeding. And, you know, they had tested and, you know, the procurement process meant, oh, yeah, we have to test this app. But they tested it with a particular combination of Internet Explorer and Adobe software. And that wasn't what was out there in the real world. And it didn't work. And so they went out and just filmed users. And then they were able to go, see, look, it really doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And in some ways, that's been my life. You know, it's funny, because Code for America is sort of the latest incarnation or one of the latest incarnations of that. But when I was early in my career, you know, it was just like, oh, there's no, you know, doing documentation, you know, writing down the steps. I still remember working with one author on one of our early books. And he said, I can't write this chapter yet. And I said, that's what he said. I said, why? And he said, because the software doesn't work. And I said, that's what you have to write. Because, you know, while you're sitting here not getting this book done and there's this piece of the software that doesn't work, people are beating their heads against the wall and they think it's them.

Starting point is 00:21:06 So telling them that it doesn't work is actually the documentation that's needed right now. So I want to underscore something. So this question of how can we make X easier for people or why isn't Y easier for people? And I do want to rewind just a little bit because I and many people are very interested in how you think well, first of all, this is just personal curiosity. What do your other siblings do these days as professions? Any examples? Well, let me kind of go through. My oldest brother has had a pastiche of careers. He owns a small fleet of taxi cabs where he's been competing with Uber and Lyft and kind of fulminating against the taxi system.

Starting point is 00:22:16 He would like to be able to operate like Uber and Lyft and can't. And he also runs a business reselling used books, including mine on Amazon. So he's kind of in these, unfortunately he's dealing with two very, uh, uh, declining industries. Uh, and, uh, he, um, uh, uh, my, my next brother has run a small publishing company that I started with him called Traveler's Tales, which wrote – basically was a story-based approach to travel rather than guidebooks, which tell you what to do. It was more like people sharing their experiences so you could go, oh, yeah, that sounds like exactly what I want as opposed to kind of the catalog approach. And so he's been a travel writer for many years. And then my – all of my sisters have basically just – have raised families. Although it's interesting, a very heavy percentage of homeschooling in in my family and uh so that's so they've been teachers

Starting point is 00:23:26 as well as as uh as parents my younger brother frank is a builder uh in college he basically built um uh a house to live in and uh and never looked back you know it was like they went i think it was a junior he had a friend built build the house that they went and lived in. This was great. So they rented it to some other students and then built another one over the summer and lived in that. Anyway, so he started – and it's kind of funny because he's really built – he still lives near the college he lived in. He's built the church, the school, the library, the homes that many of the people live in. And he now has kind of a business that's a rental business.

Starting point is 00:24:15 There's some actually fabulous places he's built on the Shenandoah River that he rents. It's kind of interesting because he's actually been a lot like me in that he built his business just intuitively from the ground up by following his nose. And what was so interesting though, when we were growing up, if you had asked my mom, she would have said that Frank and I were the most dissimilar. Why is that? Well, because, you know, I was always the top student in school and he was, you know, he got D's and F's and, you you know and we were what my brothers and i were always saying no no he just isn't interested you know because we would see him at home you know when he was 10 years old he he got totally obsessed with the civil war and he'd read you know he's reading bruce cat and all the history you know he had lots and lots of history

Starting point is 00:24:58 and you know and setting up these enormous recreations of battles of the Civil War. And we went, he's just not interested in school. And so it was just sort of interesting watching. He's seven years younger than I am, but watching him kind of have the same path of building his own business, creating a lot of value for the people around him and pivoting as necessary. You know, he got into the, even though he started with this sort of rental thing in college, he was basically building and selling homes. And then after the 2008 financial crisis, nobody would finance, you know, homes unless you had cash. But you could borrow for a business property.

Starting point is 00:25:54 So he ended up building – he had these lots and he started building places and renting them and he actually got pretty good at it. So he has a kid currently like your brother, who's clearly very, very bright, but just doesn't seem to be interested in school and therefore is getting poor grades? What would you say to someone like that, a parent in that position? It's sort of a tough one because sometimes you do have to push kids. I think the main thing, and this is true whether you're a parent with your kids or whether you're a business person or just somebody trying to solve problems in your own life, is having an attitude of receptivity and openness and looking, really looking and understanding what's going on. I mean, at the end of the day, there are no recipes. And so many problems come from people following recipes or following maps that don't match the reality.

Starting point is 00:27:01 And like Frank didn't match the recipe of what you were supposed to do in school. But it was pretty clear he was following his own path. Same thing is true of, you know, I have two daughters and one of them, school was easy. She always did well. The other one, you know, not so well. But she was like totally following her own path. And she's become this amazing sound artist. She's an artist in residence at the Exploratorium, you know, created,

Starting point is 00:27:30 you know, you know, an iPhone app for something called Rhythm Necklace is this different way of visualizing, you know, rhythm. She's sort of exploring medieval Hockets and she's, you know, scored stuff from, you know, Bjork's Biophilia tour and, you know, created, you know, these sort of all these sort of odd musical instruments just totally built her own, you know, curiosity driven path into the world. And and, you know, so the thing I guess I would just say is like, look at your kid. You know, there's a wonderful book. I forget the name of the author. It's called Loving Every Child. And it's about a guy in Nazi Germany. He basically had two schools. And one was, you know, for children of, you know, sort of wealthy, you of wealthy Germans, and then the other was a segregated school for

Starting point is 00:28:29 Jews. And when they came to take his Jewish kids, he went with them and died in the concentration camp. And, sorry, funny how we can forget those things but anyway but the point of the book is is you know if it is love your children look at them understand them and listen to them and the thing that I think, you know, treat them as people. I mean, a lot of people treat their kids as objects. You know, I've been in a room with people where they talk about their kids when they're there as if they don't, you know, they don't listen.

Starting point is 00:29:17 They're not there, you know, or they just, you know, so kids are on show or they're, you know, told what to do. And, you know, it's like treat them like you would want to be treated, you know. And I guess I felt like I did my best, you know, as a parent. Parenting is a hard job, you know, to just be there with your kids and talk with them and listen to them. Are there any questions that you like to ask your kids a lot are there any or questions you've taught them to ask themselves this might seem like a non sequitur but it's it's what came to mind for me so good i i you know uh i i wish i had an easy answer to it and I don't. That's okay.

Starting point is 00:30:09 I don't have kids, so I don't have any answers to it. in the form of a quote from a psychiatrist named Irvin Yalom, who is also a novelist. And he wrote a novel called When Nietzsche Wept, which is an imagined story of early psychoanalysis, actually pre-Freud. It was a guy who was a predecessor to Freud. And it's basically him analyzing Nietzsche. And there's this one line in it that really stuck in my head as lines do sometimes from books. And it was, first will what is necessary and then love what you will. And, you know, it does have to do with the one thing that I think we do have to teach our children.

Starting point is 00:31:06 Well, there's a lot of things we have to teach our children. But one of them is that everything doesn't come easily. And there are some things that you have to do that you don't want to do. And one of the secrets of success in life is, you know, to first, you know, will those things and then come to love them. And you think about that with exercise, a great example. You know, I mean, once, you know, it's like it's hard to get started, but once you get in into it, it becomes a joy. And there are a lot of things that are like that, you know, doing the dishes, you know, cleaning the house, you know, looking after other people. responsibilities are and then working at them if necessary with will until they become something that you love is just an incredibly useful piece of life advice.

Starting point is 00:32:14 So I'm definitely going to want to come back and talk about what you have personally found difficult or difficult moments. But I want to ask about a decision that you made. And this is transitioning from a classics degree to writing technical manuals. For lack of a better descriptor, you could certainly give some more context. But how did that happen? And why did you decide to trend in that direction? Well, it was pretty simple. First of all, let me give a little context for the classics. I had worked in the early 70s when I was actually just even a teenager with a guy named George Simon who had developed this theory about the evolution of consciousness and also about

Starting point is 00:33:10 sort of an experiential approach to, you know, kind of inner spiritual growth. You know, I could kind of go into it in more detail. But let's just and but one of his ideas was that there had been this profound evolution of consciousness over time. And there was a sort of a historical arc to it, and that we were in a period of sort of individuation that had really begun in classical Greece. And, you know, there are actually books like Bruno Snell's, the discovery of the mind, where you can kind of see this, you know, that when they talk about, you know, in Homer, uh, you know, uh, Odysseus, uh, doesn't decide to do something, you know, Athena puts this idea into

Starting point is 00:33:59 his tumas, his liver, you know, and he acts. And then by the time, you know, 400 years later, you know, you know, when you're reading about Socrates, you're seeing them wrestling with these ideas that really are at the heart of, you know, what is truth? What is justice? What is, you know, you know, what is happiness? And by the way, that was sort of the subject of my thesis in classics was really about – it was about mysticism and logic in Plato because they would kind of talk about, well, these mystical passages, he must have been influenced by the Orphics. I'm like, no, these things that we now kind of rehearse like ideas of justice, they were incredibly new and powerful. And, yes, they felt like these mystical kind of things that they were wrestling with. And but anyway, but I digress. But so the point of the reason I was interested in classics was deeply connected with George's

Starting point is 00:34:55 theory, because I was into like, OK, we're now entering into he had this idea that we were entering into this new phase of global consciousness. And it's a real irony because my long detour into tech turned out not to be a detour at all because who would have thought that, you know, I'm trying to think how much longer, 30 years later, I would be kind of the prophet of global consciousness in the form of Web 2.0, you know, right? And mediated by technology.

Starting point is 00:35:25 But to answer your question very specifically, it was, you know, my wife and I had been talking about having kids. She was saying, you know, about six, she was seven years older than I was, and she was ready before I was. You know, I was, and she was ready before I was. I was 24. I basically said, you know, one day I said, I'm ready. She had been saying, let's have kids. And I said, okay, I'm ready.

Starting point is 00:35:56 And the very next day, I still remember it. These three things happened on the same day, and it was almost like a sign. One of them. Well, I guess the main thing I would just say is once I decided it was sort of like, oh, I have to start really being the breadwinner. I have to be a provider. And it was sort of like a light got switched, got flicked. You know, it was like so I the three things that happened the day of that decision or the day after that decision, one, it was it was not really meaningful other than just a psychological boost. I had a friend who was dating the Philippine ambassador to the UN. And he was trying to remember a quote from Lao Tzu, And she knew that I was really deeply into Lao Tzu. And so, you know, she called me up to say, hey, my, you know, my friend needs this quote for his speech. He's going to give it the UN. You know, it was just kind of cool. You know, this kid being asked as a source for this speech. That gave me a boost. The other thing was I got approached by another friend to write a book about Frank Herbert, which is the thing that ended up convincing me that I was a writer. And then the third thing was I had this friend who

Starting point is 00:37:18 was a programmer who got asked to write a manual. And I said I would help him. And so in some ways, it was, you know, like, I made the decision and then magically, the all the pieces arrived on the table, you know, for me to start assembling the puzzle of my life. What or I mean, perhaps you also I just had the selective attention. Yeah, to spot those things. I had a couple of questions. I don't want to gloss over this. One day I woke up and I said, I am ready. What triggered that?

Starting point is 00:37:54 Was there a conversation you had in your head over that cup of coffee that morning? Was there a realization? What actually led you to proclaim that you're a ready? Let me kind of go back to George Simon because a lot of what he taught was kind of a kind of mental discipline that was rooted in a model of how consciousness happens. And it was sort of framed somewhat in the language of Alfred Korsivsky's general semantics. Korsivsky had this wonderful diagram that he drew. It was actually a tool that he used to train people. He called it the structural differential. And Korsivsky's fundamental idea was that people are stuck in language.

Starting point is 00:38:43 But language is about something. And so he represented the process of what he called the process of abstraction so that people could kind of ask themselves, where are you in that process? And so the structural differential, the first part was a parabola. And the idea was the reason why it's a parabola is because reality is infinite. But we can't take in all of reality. And so hanging from the parabola was a circle. And the circle was our experience, which is our first abstraction from reality.

Starting point is 00:39:20 And then hanging from the circle are a bunch of label-shaped tags, like multiple strings of them. And these are the words that we use to describe our experience. And Krosybski's training was for people to recognize when they were in the words, when they were in the experience, when they were open to the reality. And George kind of mixed that in with this work of Sri Aurobindo, who was a, you know, Indian sage, and kind of had come up with a model that kind of integrated kind of a spiritual view of this and a practice, which was a kind of, of just listening, you know, being open to the unknown. Is that, you know, an active, is that? Yeah. Yes. It's a tactic thing. You know, you, you, you know, it's just like, uh, you can see when somebody is doing it, but it's just like letting go, letting things come in and then actually letting,

Starting point is 00:40:19 if you do it correctly, what starts to happen is you start feeling things and you don't really know what they are. They don't match. You know, it's not like, you know, you, you put your hand on a table and you feel the table, but there's kind of a spiritual energy that you feel and you sit with it and eventually ideas form, you know, see this actual process that was described by the structural differential. You can actually use as a spiritual practice. And you're wrestling with a problem like, am I ready to have kids? You're not sitting there down in the labels saying, you know, pros and cons. You know, there are people who do that, right? But using this approach, you simply say, you know, let me pose this as a problem to this infinite universe, and let me sit in an attitude

Starting point is 00:41:09 of receptivity and listen till an answer comes. And I think this is what a lot of people mean by prayer. But it's really interesting to put it in the context of perception, because this same process happens in the real world you know it is what happens you know there's these things outside you and you don't really look at them you know you don't take them in and then you know but but so this sort of this so basically the answer is i kind of said am i ready i just had this attitude of openness and this, this internal process that goes on. And then one day it just crystallizes and the label that hangs off that moment, the first label is I'm ready, you know, and then the next label is, you know, here are these,

Starting point is 00:41:58 these things that I'm going to do. So I am fascinated by this. Did you pose the question, and I have a number of friends, Josh Waitzkin, who's best known as the inspiration for the book and the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, who's thought of as a chess prodigy, but is a lot more than that. Reid Hoffman also has a similar approach to journaling, where they will pose a question to themselves the day or the night prior to when they journal in the morning. For you, did you pose this question

Starting point is 00:42:32 at a particular time when, and, you know, maybe there are, is this something that you have used in other places? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, for me, I mean, at that particular time, you know, when I was younger and closer to that as, you know, a big part of my daily work, I think it was just sort of a natural outflow. I mean, at the time, what I was doing for a living was actually teaching these techniques. So it was sort of – I lived and breathed this stuff. But it's continued to be this key part of my life. Whenever I'm confronted with a problem, you find yourself wrestling and you go, oh, wait. I'm just rearranging the labels.

Starting point is 00:43:19 That's not very useful. Could you give me a real-world example from your life? Or a hypothetical, but specific example? Let me give you a very, you know, a specific business example. It's not quite the same in that it wasn't, you know, kind of this explicitly inner process, but it was certainly an outgrowth. Actually, it wasn't in a process. I take it back. So I – and this is my sort of my contribution to the evolution of the open source movement. So I was sitting there and I had been part of this Unix community and this internet community. And I noticed something. And what I noticed was that the people, for the most part, the people that I knew from Unix, which is really represented by people who are around this community, this conference called Usenix. And then the people from the internet who were kind of would meet over at the IETF with relatively few exceptions

Starting point is 00:44:21 didn't overlap. Right. And that they did overlap in my life because I was publishing books about, you know, both work coming out of both of these communities. And I thought, I want to bring them together. But something was stopping me. You know, like I had this idea, I wanted to, you know, get people from the unix community and i started thinking about it and i kept delaying and delaying and delaying and it was like there was something um that was not letting me do it and then one you know and i was i was one and then uh netscape announced that they were going to release what later became Mozilla as free software. And I went, damn, I'm too late. I've done this.

Starting point is 00:45:12 I should have kind of moved on this sooner. It's now starting to become a story about free software and why it's important. And, um, and then I got kicked me into gear and I organized this event that I first called the freeware summit where I invited in people from all these different communities. And it was at that meeting that, uh, Eric Raymond said, well, you know, we were at meeting a couple of weeks ago and Christine Peterson came up with this new name, open source software, because, you know, free software has these, these problems, you know, as, as, as a name. And we voted on it and all agreed to use, you know, free software as the, the, I mean, open source software as this name. And we, I'd organized a press conference at the end of the day, even though I didn't know what the outcome was going to be. And we kind of, you know, I put people up on this stage and said, look at all these guys, they all have dominant market share in these interesting categories of software. and they all have this thing in common. They give their software away for free, and we've come together and we've decided on a new name for it.

Starting point is 00:46:14 We're calling it open source software. And the thing that was sort of interesting about that was, first of all, yes, I noticed that something was wrong in the map of the world. You know, that basically people who were talking about free software were only talking about Linux. And there was this whole other world of free software over on the Internet side that was left out because the dialogue was, you know, about, you know, the battle against Microsoft and the PC and so on. And so I just kind of, you know, so I was just sitting with it, you know, and, and, and trying to think about what to do. And that sitting, that attitude of receptivity was something very similar that kind of happened in some sense. One day, you know, this thing happened. It was, I sometimes use the analogy of you're doing a puzzle and you can't solve it.

Starting point is 00:47:02 And then somebody dumps new pieces on the table, right? And then you go, oh, there, that one fits right in. And that's exactly what happened there. But that waiting, that waiting is part of the psychological process. You know, like if you're sort of – if you kind of have this engineering mindset, well, we're just going to go and work with all the pieces that we have, you know, you may not get to the right answer. And so this receptivity to the unknown, you know, and I actually often think of Socrates in this regard.

Starting point is 00:47:32 He referred to something he called his daimon, you know, just like listening to this inner voice that would tell him yes or no. I also think there's this great line that recurs continually in my favorite translation of Lao Tzu, The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu by Witter Benner. And the line is, he has his no and he has his yes. And listening to that no and that yes. So, you know, I had this no about I'm not ready to have a child. And then one

Starting point is 00:48:01 day I had a yes. And I had this no, I'm not ready to bring all these people together and then I had a yes. And the fact that there's this, I had no way of knowing that this new term had been introduced. But if I had had my meeting a month earlier, the term open source software would not have been there to be picked up at my meeting. You know, and, you know, it's a mystery. Why is it that, you know, like, I didn't know that, but something stopped me and I was kind

Starting point is 00:48:40 of kicking myself. But like listening to that inner voice. I just said, no, I'm not. And then one day it's like, yes, you know, he has his no, and then he has his yes, or she has her yes. So I think that you and I might, I don't know if you drink alcohol, but if you do, then maybe this is more of a conversation for several bottles of wine, but what I'm about to bring up. So you mentioned Odysseus, aka Ulysses, and the sort of a god planting an idea or a desire in his liver, right? And then you have, flash forward to, I think you had mentioned Plato, and grappling with this concept of justice,

Starting point is 00:49:21 and then, you know, what seemed mystical now being part of the norm is our consciousness evolving or uh looking back at the framework that you were discussing with the parabola then abstraction so we have reality then an abstraction of experience and a further abstraction of language are we just getting further from reality? Or are they the same thing, evolving consciousness and getting further from that direct experience of greater reality? Well, you know, I think it's different. I mean, when you say we, if you mean all of humanity, I think we're all, you know, rediscovering, you know, that process in our lives, you know, um, I think, uh, societies can get further or closer. Uh, individuals can get further or closer,

Starting point is 00:50:15 but I think as a whole, we have in fact taken in more and more of that parabola. You know, the circle has gotten bigger. And the useful, you know, labels have gotten bigger. Also, many of them have gotten, you know, things get mislabeled. But, you know, if you think, and this was sort of another piece of what I learned from George Simon. It really was this idea that that is our work. Our work is to take in more of the unknown and to bring it into our experience and to bring it into our knowledge. There's always more. George used to have this great formulation.

Starting point is 00:51:05 He referred to God as et cetera, you know, all the rest. I love it. Yeah. And I love that, you know, and it's just sort of, for me, it's, it's a useful, not just mental construct, but psychological construct. Yeah. And it comes up for me, you know, the way I, the way I, you know, when I have an idea like this, it, I just see it everywhere. You know, it used to be this, I mean, still is, I think this, this, um, mock tarot deck called Morgan's tarot. I've never seen it. Which is popular in the seventies. I don't know if it's still available anywhere, but it had these, these, uh, fabulous cards. And my favorite card was always the one, it was basically a blank card with the caption, always remember this. You know, always remember, you know, and it was just that moment of just listening to the silence. And, you know, when you have that ability to listen to the silence, you also have the ability

Starting point is 00:52:00 to, you know, take things in in a different way and see the world fresh. So that I think about Morgan Sturow but I also think about Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite poets, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. We keep coming back and back to the real, to the hotels and not to the hymns that fall on it out of the wind. Reality is the beginning, not the end. The naked alpha, not the higher and not to the hymns that fall on it out of the wind. You know, reality is the beginning, not the end, the naked alpha, not the higher and further mega. He's kind of talking about the way that our mind endlessly elaborates on what he calls the eyes,

Starting point is 00:52:37 the eyes playing something, the vulga of experience. You know, and it is also a great line, you know, um, a poem is the cry of its occasion, a part of the thing and not about it. You know, this dialogue between the mind and the stuff that we engage with in the world, you know, is our life. Mm-hmm. Oh, there's so many directions we could go. I'm going to tie this into a later question, but I wanted to flashback to Frank Herbert. You mentioned the name in passing. You wrote, as you mentioned, you had an opportunity to write a biography, correct me if I'm wrong, but of Frank Herbert, who's the author of the Dune series.

Starting point is 00:53:28 Yeah. Dune is one of those fiction books, the first Dune, that shaped a lot of how I look at the world in some pretty wide-reaching ways. Why did you decide to undertake that? Were there any lessons that you took away from studying his life or his work? You know, again, it was complete serendipity. When my friend Dick Riley asked me, you know, would I write this book, he had been appointed the editor of this new series of critical monographs of detective novelists and science fiction novelists. Uh, uh, you know, I first said, oh, I wanted to write about Samuel Delaney, uh, who was, uh,

Starting point is 00:54:13 at the time my favorite, uh, you know, writer, because I, I had, uh, I loved a little book of his called the empire star, which was, as you might expect about the nature of consciousness. And, and, and Dick was once in, no, no, I think the book on Herbert will do much better. You should really do it. And I had loved Dune. Oh, I have a very funny story about it going back to my childhood. I think I read it when I was 12. And I got it from the library.

Starting point is 00:54:38 And I remember my dad picked me up from the Lake Merced Library in San Francisco. I always used to get – you could check out eight books and i would get eight you know big books and you know he looks at this and he says it's sinful that so large a book should be devoted to science fiction and so i i i couldn't quite bring myself when i wrote the frank herbert book to dedicate it to my father with that uh but uh anyway but but yeah i was really grateful to dick because uh you know i i do i can't i mean i had loved dune but getting deeper into it and spending time with frank you know it was definitely one of you know he was he was the other you know i've had multiple fathers in my life which is a wonderful thing you know people who've kind of other you know i've had multiple fathers in my life which is a wonderful thing you know people who've kind of helped you know shape me you know and it does you know make me

Starting point is 00:55:30 think that you know one of the things that you know is so missing in our culture is that we don't have enough fathers i agree enough mothers you know sort of like when, when you think about, you know, how we were meant to be raised, you know, in, in these communities, you know, the, uh, you know, the, the, the sort of the nuclear family is kind of a crime against humanity, you know, that's a strong word, but just like, how do we build stronger communities? Cause I think in my life, how important it was to have people who said, you're special, and I know you deeply, and I see something in you. And just to expect that two adult parents are the only people who can do that for you. How do we build richer communities of adults who help model and shape our children? So I was just super lucky because I had my you know, my own dad and I had George Simon and then I had Frank Herbert and I had my my ex-wife's father,

Starting point is 00:56:31 Jack, the guy named Jack Feldman, who kind of inspired me to think about business. And it was just so interested as I built my business. You know, when he died, it was almost like I had been leaning on this wind and I almost fell over, you know, because it was, it was just like, I hadn't realized just how much his continued interest was feeding me. You know, it's like, and, um, you know, the, the, the love and interest we can give to other people is such a gift. Did you spend, and I apologize that I don't know this, but I guess it'd be boring if I knew all the answers to my questions for this. Uh, did you spend time with Frank Herbert or was it? Oh yeah, I did. I did. Yeah. Uh, you know, I, the, um, and it was, it was, it was funny because I met with him two or three times when I was writing, I did two books. Uh, the first book was this, uh, you know,

Starting point is 00:57:21 critical biography, you know, which is really about his books as much as about his life. And it only went up through Dune Messiah. None of the later Dune books had been written at that point, which is fortunate because they were just basically, he was kind of milking the franchise. But whereas the first three books

Starting point is 00:57:43 were really conceived of as a whole from the beginning. But and then the second book was a collection of his essays. So I based which I, you know, I edited and an interview. So I interviewed him on the road for the first book. He would be at some science fiction convention and so on. So I interviewed him two or three times, I think, in that period. And what was sort of frustrating was I wanted to get below the surface. He was, he was sort of like, he was a brilliant conversationalist and he kind of would, you know, just very inspiring ideas about how we have to live on the edge of crisis and it's what

Starting point is 00:58:19 keeps us alive. And, you know, it just, you know, it was just a fount of fascinating ideas and um you know so it was scintillating stuff that you know if you could do do these interviews that you know you could publish them immediately you know but i kind of wanted to get under the surface and learn more about who he was and how he thought and but i couldn't because he was sort of on because he was on tour right and then when i did the second book where i was like i need some more of these sort of frank on fire interviews i went to i went to his home in port townsend washington we hung out for a couple of days and uh yeah he was just mellow and relaxed and i kind of learned all i got to know him and

Starting point is 00:59:02 you know but it wasn't all this great material It was sort of like I got the interviews in the wrong order. So anyway, he was a really wonderful guy who thought very deeply about the world, had very prescient ideas about the things that continue to bedevil us today. I think of many great lines from his books all the time. Fear is the mind killer. Yes. The Bene Gesserit. There's so many good lines. If you were to... So I was a nonfiction purist for a very, very long time, for decades. I'm embarrassed in retrospect to admit this, but I was of the mind for a very, very long time, for decades. I'm embarrassed in retrospect to admit this,

Starting point is 00:59:45 but I was of the mind for a very long time that if I wanted to make stuff up, I could do that in my own head. And I wanted to actually learn things by reading nonfiction. And I've realized how, at least for me, how off that was and how many deep truths are better transmitted through fiction. Uh, for nonfiction addicts who are willing to have an intervention and read a few fiction books. So there are any that you would suggest that you might suggest people start with? Oh, that's so tough. Um, or to make it less pressured, a few of your favorites. Well, certainly uh you know books that have sort of shaped my life i mean dune definitely one of them uh i highly recommend that uh there's another uh fantasy book you know it's not really fantasy in the sense of you know heroic fantasy that people

Starting point is 01:00:41 think is a book called islandia uh written uh it was actually a personal passion project of a boston lawyer named austin tappan right uh it's just an imaginary uh world uh it was it was probably the closest analog in the real world is new zealand uh you know it was this pastoral country somewhere in the southern hemisphere that had been closed off to western civilization the guy started writing it like 1910 and um he died in a car accident in 1930 or so and in the mid 40s uh 43 i think it was his daughter had carved out of his you know writings about this imaginary world this book irlandia which was published and actually made it up to i think number three on the new york times bestller list. And it was rediscovered in the

Starting point is 01:01:27 70s, which is when I came across it. A wonderful guide to kind of the values of, you know, living a slower life, because it's all about this guy who's, you know, his roommate at Harvard, class of 06, was from Ilandia. And so he learns to speak Ilandian. And then when they're trying to open up the country, he gets tapped to become the consul. And he's sort of struggling with, you know, kind of like the modern way of life versus this Ilandian way of life. And a lot of people I've tried to give it to find it too slow.

Starting point is 01:02:01 But what a rich cornucopia of wisdom is in that book. In terms of classics, I mean you can't do better than Jane Austen. I mean for understanding the human soul. I still remember discovering Pride and Prejudice. I think I was 14. And I was a little embarrassed to be reading what I thought I was as a girl book. Yeah, for sure. But it was like, so good. And in a similar vein, I've come to love Anthony Trollope. Because he's just, he's like, let's get this plot stuff out of the way. I just want to talk about the people, you know.

Starting point is 01:02:50 And, you know, you read a book like The Warden and you kind of go, oh, my God, I am reading a novel about the moral quandaries of an 1850s British cleric, and it's freaking fascinating. I think of another book that I read. What was it called? Night Train to Lisbon. And this is not, I wouldn't say is in that same category, but sometimes it's just a line in a book. And this was, you know, that just changed my life in some ways. It came at a critical juncture and when i was it was and the line was

Starting point is 01:03:25 given that there is so much in all of us what happens to the rest and you know you know that kind of moment of because and that that hit this very deep part of me like you know when i was a teenager i used to have this fantasy that like i could live multiple lives you know but i didn't want to just kind of have a different life. I wanted to have multiple lives all at the same time. I wanted to be this multiplex person who could be multitudes. The other thing I would just highly recommend, highly recommend in addition to fiction is poetry. I mean the thing that changed my life with regard to poetry i'm not sure why it was but uh when i was a junior in high school i decided i wanted to get poetry and i just picked

Starting point is 01:04:13 up the collected poems of william butler yates and i read the entire book it's you know three or four hundred pages of poetry and and the two things that i learned from that were one how to read poetry you know because a lot of people just are unfamiliar with, you know, kind of the stylized form. But more than that, what I learned was, oh, most of, you know, 20 of them do nothing for me. And then there's one that just goes bang. and um you know and so learning that you know and so many people don't learn to love poetry because they they've been force-fed you know 19 poems and they never got to that 20th poem such a good point that's such a good point i uh not to not interject but i resisted poetry for far longer than i resisted fiction which is saying a lot. And then interviewed actually a friend of mine, Rolf Potts, who wrote a wonderful book called

Starting point is 01:05:10 Vagabonding, which I took around the world for me for 18 months in 2004, 2005. And he suggested a few starter books for poetry. And later, I ended up picking up a fantastic Rumi collection by, I think, Coleman Barks, I want to say the name is. Yeah, Coleman Barks. And the introduction alone to that book will make the hair stand up on your arms, if you have hairy arms, maybe somewhere else otherwise. And I found, when I asked a very good friend of mine, who's a huge Rumi fan, how should I read Rumi? He said exactly what you just said. He said, you need to read a lot of them because for me, it's every 15th or every 20th that just really grabs me and I know is going to stick with me. So not expecting that you're going to get or like every single one of them.

Starting point is 01:06:04 Are there any places that you would suggest people potentially start when it comes to poetry? Well, I think you pick up a good one. Actually, my exposure to Kabir and Rumi came through Robert Bly. I love Robert Bly's Kabir book. I like Coleman Barks a lot as well. Not as fond of the Stephen Mitchell editions. But, you know, there's just good collections of poetry, you know, and more poems of the English language. Or, you know, I personally, you know, maybe it's too intellectual for most people. But Wallace Stevens, go find a couple of poems of Wallace Stevens.

Starting point is 01:06:48 If you can't read of mere being or esthetic du mal and come to some like, oh, my God, that's magical. Then, you know, again, he's he's particularly difficult because this is – oh, actually, this is where I would start. East Coker by T.S. Eliot. Oh, my God. That's one of my favorite poems. It's about death and rebirth and unbelievably good. Yeah, T.S. Eliot is hard to go wrong with. Yeah, TSLA, it's hard to go wrong with. Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to come back to living multiple lives

Starting point is 01:07:29 and having multitudes contained within a single person because I think you have lived many, many lives. Yeah, I do my best. And I have more questions on books, and I'll just give out a teaser. We'll come back to this. But I've heard from reliable sources that you love to read old bestsellers from generations ago that are now long forgotten. So I want to find out why.

Starting point is 01:07:53 We're going to come back to that. But since a lot of people listening are curious about the edge that you often find. So in 1993, you launched the Global Network Navigators, I understand, the first web portal, first site to be supported by banner ads. No, let me correct you on that. Not banner ads. Banner ads came two years later. Ah, okay. The very first ads were much closer to yellow page ads.

Starting point is 01:08:22 And the reason was that there were only 200 websites, right? So we basically were like, Hey, we can put content for you on the web. So it was much closer to putting up a website than it was to putting up a banner. I got it. It didn't come until there were enough websites that you could point people somewhere else. Good point. That's a very good point. And the AOL bought it in 95, is that right? That's correct. Okay. Why do you think you were the first or one of the first to recognize this opportunity, meaning ad-supported web portal? Well, first of all, I should be clear that I came up with the ad-supported part. Dale Doherty, who was one of my key people at O'Reilly Media for many years, went on to actually start Make Magazine and Maker Faire.

Starting point is 01:09:16 And we spun that out into a separate company called Maker Media. It was the one who kind of discovered the World Wide Web for us. And it was really following, you know, earlier threads in our business. Dale had been very, very interested in online publishing. In 1987, he had created our first e-book, which was a hypercard version of a book I had created called Unix in a nutshell. And so he had been pursuing e-books. And he had started something – actually, I may have the timing wrong, but I think it's right. So we had been basically trying to figure out how to – and we had these books on something called the X window system. And we started working, uh, this, this is

Starting point is 01:10:10 before XML existed with something called SGML standard generalized markup language, uh, which is before the web. And we were trying to figure out how to represent our books, you know, for online publishing. And there was a piece of pattern recognition that I had done, which was, oh, you know, um, uh, you know, the, the world, there's starting to be a lot of, of commercial software products for reading books, but I felt like we needed a standard of some kind for our online content, because we weren't going to be a software company, but we wanted everybody to be able to read the same content. This was sort of inspired by, yeah, we were a documentation consulting company, and we'd worked with this guy who had to maintain 200 different versions of his software.

Starting point is 01:11:02 And we were like, screw this, you know, so because we had all these people who were coming to us, because our X books had been adopted as the documentation by a bunch of, you know, Unix workstation companies, and HP had answer book, and, you know, Sun had info explorer. And, you know, so there were like, five, six, seven different kind of, and we said, no, we want to have one format that everybody reads. And so Dale had started working on developing that format, which came to be called DocBook. And it was really for representing technical books in, you know, in a markup language. But then we realized and one of the things that we learned from the X window system, you know, this is bob scheifler had kind of taught us this he said look you know you know what we really are the way that we use free software

Starting point is 01:11:49 you know this is a big contrast to you know how you know uh you know linux grew up was simply we're trying to build a reference implement not even a reference implementation a sample implementation that people can improve on and so we had this idea that we needed a free book browser. And Dale discovered this tool called Viola, which was really the first graphical web browser, and that led into the web. And then Dale introduced me to Tim Berners-Lee, and Dale was like – we were just publishing this – our first book about the internet book called The Whole Internet User's Guide Catalog, which we published in 1993 and – or 1992, fall of 92. And it had a catalog in the back of interesting internet sites. If you tell that to this site, you'll get earthquake information. If you – it was go for the web. We we actually dale was going to say we got to have

Starting point is 01:12:48 the web in here there were only 200 websites and we you know the editor mike lucchini's actually wrote a chapter at the last minute right before publication it's so we could slip it in but then pay pay way who was a he was a student at the time that a guy had written Viola, you know, um, uh, he said, well, I could make a cool demo for the catalog in the back of the book, you know, and the catalog was, um, it was kind of this list of couple hundred interesting sites on the internet that people could try out. And, uh, so he built this thing and it was like it was basically a point and click catalog of the of the early internet and i said hey that's not a demo that's a product you know and uh so our first idea was that we you know the internet was still very you know early so we our first idea was we

Starting point is 01:13:38 were going to build a kiosk so people could try the internet using this point and click interface and so that was what we built. And then Dale wanted to build a magazine, kind of like what Make Magazine became for the maker movement about the early people of the web. And I said, you know, he originally thought of this a quarterly magazine. I said, no, actually, I think, Dale, I think people are going to have the web open on there. You know, they'll be they'll be looking at the web every day, you know, so we have to have it constantly updated. And we kind of brainstormed back and forth and we kind of developed. So there was the catalog component, which was part of what we were doing, and then kind of articles about the people behind this new thing.

Starting point is 01:14:17 And I was just kind of looking at my desk one day and we followed the industry through these print magazines. And, you know, the way they worked was there were articles and there were ads and there was this bingo card in the middle, you know, which is this card with, you know, kind of like this giant matrix of numbers, like a multiple choice exam. And you would circle 82 and the ad or the article, you know, corresponding to number 82 would send you a package in the mail i remember those sure and i thought that's really inefficient we could do that on the web you know so so we could deliver the information directly so uh that was the original vision and it's sort of funny so the advertising that we invented for the web was really the website, the commercial website, because up to that point, there were no commercial websites. And so the banner ad was this much later layer. It was simply the idea that you could build a commercial website that advertised your product or service and gave you information about it. So the very first ad we did was effectively a website for our law firm,

Starting point is 01:15:28 within GNN. It wasn't because we didn't set up the entire website, but it was literally just here's Heller, White, McCall, if here's what we do, here's how to reach us. Yeah, it was an ad. So we had this a so we had this sort of uh uh directory you know catalog we had this sort of hey here are all these cool sites and now here's the commercial catalog so so i wanted to uh just confirm something about the whole internet users guide and catalog so this this book you mentioned, 92, and in a piece titled The Oracle of Silicon Valley, I think this is in Inc., there's a description of one of your marketing approaches.

Starting point is 01:16:17 And it says, To market a general interest book from a small publisher about a relatively obscure topic, O'Reilly devised a novel marketing strategy. He would turn himself into an activist. He hired the former director of activism from the Sierra Club and devised a campaign that treated the adoption of the internet like the effort to save the rainforest. He mailed copies of the book to every member of Congress and then went on a media tour in New York City and Washington, D.C. And then this is a quote from you. I was saying, the internet is coming,

Starting point is 01:16:40 the internet is coming, he says. And O'Reilly Media had the only book that could explain it to you. Is there anything that you would add to that? Anything you would correct? I just, it's a fascinating story. But that's all I have. As is the case in so many of these stories, you know, this sort of the hero story. It wasn't my idea to do that. It was this guy, Brian Irwin.

Starting point is 01:17:05 We had hired Brian Irwin from the Sierra Club and we were able to hire, we were up in Sebastopol. He was actually commuting down to San Francisco and he, wow, there's a, there's a company up here that might be interesting. And then he came in and he said, you know, he's the one who taught me about activism. It wasn't like I had this idea. It was like, no, Brian was this master of activism and he invented early internet marketing. And he's kind of one of the unsung heroes. You know, he was the one who said, first of all, he, you know, what he said to me is like, people are not going to care about our book. You know, we want to make them care about the internet. And, uh, that was where really he taught me about marketing as activism about big ideas. And he was the one who taught me about marketing as activism about big ideas.

Starting point is 01:17:46 And he was the one who said, we're going to go do a press tour about the internet. And he also, you know, gave away, you know, copies of the internet to people who were on Usenet, you know, really kind of pioneered a lot of influencer marketing techniques. This is 1992. And, you know, he's kind of, it's so sad that he has not gotten enough credit. What was his name again? Brian Irwin. How do you spell his last name? E-R-W-I-N.

Starting point is 01:18:14 I think he left the company around 2000. And I think he's a marketing consultant still, uh, in, in, uh, uh, living in Santa Rosa. All right. I'll track him down and send a link his way. Uh, the, the observation that you brought up about the cards in the magazines where you circle number 82, that's really inefficient, right? So this also kind of relates to the how can we make X

Starting point is 01:18:47 easier for people? So could you, these types of questions or heuristics are interesting to me. And I'd love if you could elaborate a bit. I actually don't know this name, I'm embarrassed to say, but Hal Varian and his observation that if you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today. Could you elaborate on that, please? Well, first off, Hal first came into my can because he was the chief economist at Google. He was the guy who figured out a bunch of things about the Google ad auction that made Google such an economic powerhouse. So but it turns out he was also he wrote the textbook on microeconomics that almost every economist learned, you know, learned from. So but, yeah, he's made that comment famously and i i i remember talking with him uh one night it was dinner with me and

Starting point is 01:19:47 andy mcafee and eric brinjalson the authors of of the second machine age and machine platform crowd and uh carl shapiro the guy with whom hal had written a book called information rules he'd been one of hal's grad students when he was teaching at berkeley And Carl had just been at the White House, and he was sort of reacting with horror at this statement of Hal's. You know, and it's like, it sounds like, oh, my God, this is the worst Silicon Valley libertarian kind of observation. And it's very easy for people to react that way to it. But yet, if you think about it, you know, it's like, who first owned automobiles? Rich people. Who first owned cell phones? Rich people. You know, rich people used to fly, you know, or not fly, they would do the Grand Tour of Europe, you know, now soccer hooligans follow their, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:41 their team around Europe, you know, and their whole, you know, rich people used to eat out, you know. Now everybody eats out. You know, it's like more people eat out than cook. You know, and so it really is a really interesting tool for thinking and tool for seeing. You know, and I think that's kind of like such a key concept for me is, you know, people and this kind of goes back to the structural differential and people kind of trying to, you know, judge ideas against other ideas. Is it some kind of zero sum game? You know, and it's like, no, all of these things, you know, reality is, is infinite. You know, reality is far more than any of the nets we weave

Starting point is 01:21:28 to catch it in, right? So if you accept that, then you kind of go, these are simply tools to help us see. And so I go, does this help me see? Yes. And so, for example, in my forthcoming book, there's a whole chapter that's in some ways based on this, which is, it's called why we'll never run out of jobs, you know, and it's because, you know, uh, uh, you know, you, you look at what happens in rich societies and, and how basically commodity products get elaborated in more and more ways. So, you know, look, think about craft beers that are more expensive than commodity beers. Think about specialty coffees that are more expensive than commodity coffee. And what's added? In a lot of ways, it's a story that's added.

Starting point is 01:22:17 And yes, sure, the story has physical components. This came from – this coffee is actually Alexiswards alexis madrigal's uh containers podcast is fabulous on this subject episode four is about the history of also the evolution of the coffee uh market but you know yeah this coffee came from this particular you know coffee plantation in guatemala uh you know all the things that that you know have to come into place to make that – bring that to a particular coffee roaster and they tell that story. And as a result of that story – and the reality that goes with the story that this is actually a unique flavor. Of course if it doesn't match, if it doesn't deliver, then people – not much to the story. But if it delivers, then people, yes, they will pay more.

Starting point is 01:23:07 And so this is why I believe that, you know, like as we commoditize labor, there's one of the reasons I should say, you know, with AI, with robots, you know, we can find new things for people to do. I mean, there's three things. First of all, again, this is a major theme of my book, which we haven't really talked about, but let's, let's get into it. You know, one is there's plenty of work to do for Christ's sake. You know, so the big question is not, you know, like, you know, you know, we talk too much about jobs and not enough about work. Cause if we, if we focused on what work needs doing, then we start to ask,

Starting point is 01:23:48 what's keeping us from doing that work? And we realize that there's something broken in our economic system that's diverting our energy and investment away from doing the work that needs doing towards financial gains and people who are sort of extracting money from the economy without actually getting the work done

Starting point is 01:24:04 that we need doing. So that's one piece. But the second thing is obviously all this work being done that is not being compensated for. I have this sort of metaphor. It originally came to me in the context of open source software. But it really entered my consciousness as a mental tool in the 70s when I read it in Stewart Brand's Coalition Quarterly. It was a concept called the clothesline paradox, which is these things that simply disappear from our economic accounting.

Starting point is 01:24:39 So you think about in the clothesline paradox, it really was like, OK, we're measuring solar energy versus, you know, renewables versus fossil fuels. And if somebody puts their clothes in the dryer, it's fossil fuel usage. But if somebody takes their clothes and put it on the line, it doesn't accrue to the solar column. Right. And, you know, and I kind of made an analogy from that to open source software, which sort of disappeared from our economic accounting for so long before people like, you know, Google and Amazon figured out how to build enormous businesses on top of it. But, you know, if you look at our economy today, you know, it's like taking care of people, you know, mostly uncompensated, you know, a lot of creativity, you know, poorly compensated.

Starting point is 01:25:27 You know, it's like, why is it, you know, if these things that are so valuable don't get paid for? Right. They're sort of they're, you know, they're taken out of the economic paradigm. We need to fix that. And, you know, it's not necessarily saying, well, thou must pay for this, you know, because the people of supply and demand. There's all kinds of hacks that societies have used to value things differently. You know, just a good example is child labor. You know, how did we we didn't start, you know, saying, well, we have to pay children more. No, we're going to stop using them for this thing. Right. And that actually reduced the workforce that actually reduced the workforce. We reduced working hours.

Starting point is 01:26:07 And what did we do with that? We sent them to school, right? We actually paid as a society to send kids to school. And then later, we don't need all these teenagers on the farms anymore. Oh, let's send them to school. You know, and then the high school movement started around 1909. You know, 9% of Americans went to high school in 1909. By 1935, it was about 70%.

Starting point is 01:26:34 You know, it's like this amazing social revolution. You know, so what is it that we could do today around like, okay, let's actually, it doesn't have to be that we start paying people. It could be that we do universal basic income, but we somehow need to revalue some of the things, education, creativity, caring in our economy. And again, in that whole creativity economy, you have to understand that that economy writ large is wrapped up in that Hal Varian statement. Because if you look, I mentioned coffee and beer, but just food in general, 2% of our population now in the U.S. works in agriculture. Yet we have more variety of food than we ever had in the day when we all worked in agriculture. That design pattern is what we need to be exploring, you know, to make our economy, you know, we need to basically say,

Starting point is 01:27:30 oh, you know, let's figure out what kinds of things become valuable as other things become commoditized and let's start valuing them appropriately. Is, uh, is the decision to value something appropriately? What are some of the drivers of that change potentially? I mean, you have market demand, right? So there could be just, for instance, you have an Uber or something like that. And all of a sudden this excess, potential excess inventory or idle time of resource X can be valued differently. People devalue owning cars, for instance. You have regulatory rights in the case of, say, child labor. You can change the rules of the game, so to speak, so that the incentives are different.

Starting point is 01:28:17 What are some of the other drivers, and are there any particular examples of things that rich people are doing now that you think are going to be commonplace and much more widely adopted? Yeah, well, I mean the thing that clearly that most rich people do that are – could become a big driver of the economy is experiences. You know, I mean, you know, you were talking about, you know, hiking in Uzbekistan with Kevin Kelly, you know, it's like most people don't get to do things like that, you know, and, you know, but just the experience economy writ large, I think is, you know, and that's everything from new kinds of food, new kinds of, you know, I think we're going to have a lot in augmented reality. You know, there's already a lot in social media. It's new kinds of experiences, new kinds of, you know, I think we're going to have a lot in augmented reality. You know, there's already a lot in social media. It's new kinds of experiences, you know, new kinds of learning, you know. I mean, learning is a huge, I mean, you know, it's like teaching

Starting point is 01:29:15 people to enjoy learning and to always be learning new things. You know, there's an economy in that. And the the the things that I think policy wise that we need to start thinking about is, first of all, we have a lot of economic policies that reward nonproductive investment. What do I mean by non-productive investment? It's sort of summed up pretty beautifully in the tale of GE where Jeff Immelt was recently forced out. I mean, by all, I mean, you know, GE sort of said, oh no, no, he meant to retire.

Starting point is 01:29:57 I don't buy it. You know, it is basically an activist investor, you know, bought a stake in the firm, started agitating for, you know, share buybacks, right? And among other things, I mean, you know, and the thing that's so amazing, they wrote this white paper in 2015. And it describes in detail what a great company GE is, you know, they have bigger market share than their competitors in these categories, they're growing faster.

Starting point is 01:30:25 They're getting more focused. And it's like this amazing story of how GE is succeeding in the real economy. And then they go with this, but the stock price has lagged. We must fix the stock price. And the way that they should do these various things, they need to spin this out. And some of those things might be rational, but they should also borrow money. And basically, when you buy back shares,

Starting point is 01:30:53 it tends to reduce the number of shares so the earnings per share go up and since stocks are often priced as a multiple of earnings per share, stock price goes up. So GE should borrow $20 billion to share, stock price goes up. So GE should borrow $20 billion to make the stock price go up. Who benefits from that? Who benefits from that? GE doesn't need that. GE's customers don't need that. Investors benefit. And it turns out that at this point,

Starting point is 01:31:19 85% of all investment in our economy is of this kind. It's for the benefit of investors. You know, Warren Buffett put it really well in this quote from Rana Foroohar's wonderful book, Makers and Takers, which is all about the sort of financialization of the economy. And he says, you know, he told her, you know, sometimes people prefer to go to the casino than the restaurant. And, you know, we have built an economy that is largely a casino. And this is why, you know, I think both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders played on this, you know, and people know there's something wrong. And our government has basically been supportive of this paper economy, and they're wringing their hands. But there's this failed idea, and this kind of brings me back to my book, which – The title of which is WTF, right?

Starting point is 01:32:18 What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. Yeah, and the why it's up to us is the key part, because, you know, there's this sense of technological determinism, you know, that I revolt against, you know, this idea that technology inevitably wants to eliminate jobs. I believe, you know, that technology wants to solve new problems. And we have to ask ourselves, what are the incentives that we've created in our system? So the book is really, in some ways, it's an economic polemic wrapped in a business book, wrapped in a memoir. And the memoir starts with kind of my experiences, you know, dealing with and thinking about, you know, the great platforms of the computer industry, you

Starting point is 01:33:03 know, starting with Microsoft. And what I saw was that Microsoft took too much of the value for themselves. People deserted their ecosystem and went elsewhere to the internet. And then I've watched the story replay itself as, you know, Google and, you know, Facebook and Twitter and so on have competed with their developer ecosystem and made it less of a good place to be and you know that lesson seems to be lost and then i of course by extension i've seen oh that's also how our financial markets which were originally designed as a sort of enabling platform for the economy and for society have ended up trading against society, taking too much of the value for themselves. And so it's this sort of ecosystem view, you know, of platforms and, and, and, and, you know, and actually also in the book, it's kind of interesting seeing how I, uh, uh,

Starting point is 01:33:58 yeah, I hate the books are slower than, uh, you know, the, the modern media, because I was kind of saying, you know, I kind of call it a little bit on, you know, Lyft versus Uber, you know, the modern media, because I was kind of saying, you know, I kind of call it a little bit on, you know, Lyft versus Uber, you know, because I say, look, they are creating more value for their ecosystem of drivers. And that really matters in the long run. And sure enough, I mean, you know, Lyft is really gaining on Uber because, you know, Uber's extractive business model has sort of caught up with them. So as a question for you, I have so many questions, of course, but the you have, and this is this is related, I think, to what you just said. So you've built, you're somewhat of an anomaly in the Silicon Valley area, in the sense that you built a

Starting point is 01:34:37 profitable business with several hundred millions of dollars in revenue without any venture capital. The slogan is what I'd love to touch upon. We can take this in any direction you'd like, but how did you come up with the slogan, and maybe you could give some backstory, create more value than you capture? That's actually Brian Irwin again. His last gift to the company.

Starting point is 01:35:00 We had a management retreat in 2000, and I think I told the story. I won't mention the name, but actually more, more than one internet, I said, you know, more than one internet billionaire has told me that they got started, uh, you know, with, you know, their whole business with, you know, what they learned from an O'Reilly book. Yeah. And Brian laughed and said, yeah, that should be our slogan. We create more value than we capture. That's how it came up.

Starting point is 01:35:30 And of course we all went, yes. Why is that? Now you've had, as I understand it, discussions with Eric Schmidt about don't be evil. It's a Google slogan. What do you, what do you think of that slogan? Is that sufficient? Is it? Well, the thing that, uh, you know, uh, I, the problem I have, and, and the, again, I mean, this was a, you know, we were at Google Zeitgeist and we had a conversation in the lobby. It wasn't like we had this profound, you know, deep, uh, you know, but I was trying to say, look, don't be evil. Isn't measurable, you know, uh you know but i was trying to say look don't be evil isn't measurable

Starting point is 01:36:06 you know create more value than you capture is measurable and uh you know and and it is and again i you know i i expand on this quite a bit on my book you know that this idea of you know when you have a system whether it's a platform or an economic system that creates more value or an ecosystem, this kind of goes back to Frank Herbert and what I learned from him. When you have an ecosystem, it has to actually create value for all its participants. And you have to be able to measure that. And we need to actually start thinking about as a society how we measure more holistically the ecosystem value that gets created. Because what we've done is we've created a set of measures that are focused exclusively on one set of market participants, which is really the market owners. If you think about what the stock market is about, it's about the people who own the systems, the companies. And we've just, you know, we've sort of forgotten that,

Starting point is 01:37:12 you know, the financial markets are a map of our expectations of what's supposed to be happening in the real economy. And instead, we're just kind of manipulating the map and kind of go, well, you know, let, you know, I'm hoping nobody notices that the real economy is going to shit, you know, while we're telling ourselves this great story. And, and, uh, I think that the, you know, figuring out, you know, are there other measures, you know, we, you know, uh, Clay Christensen's also written about this. You know, he's, you know, the author of the original, his original book was, you know, The Capitalist Dilemma. I'm sorry, not The Capitalist Dilemma, The Innovator's Dilemma, but he has a paper he wrote, and I believe there may be a book now called The Capitalist Dilemma, which is really about this question of, we started measuring the wrong things. And, you know, effectively, we started measuring started measuring you know a small subset of the things we ought to be measuring about the health of the economy

Starting point is 01:38:12 so what's uh and you know maybe this is related maybe not so feel free to tackle this in whichever order so i guess what i would love to ask is what should we measure? But you, uh, I've, I've read that you think the financial markets might well be the first rogue AI. Uh, so if, why, why do you feel that way and what should we do about it? And maybe that relates to the measurement. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the thing that I, uh, this is sort of an extended metaphor at the core of the book. I'm trying to sort of explain what I learned from platforms. And so I kind of look at, for example, at, uh, uh, Google and the way they manage search quality. And you kind of understand that even though they have this, you

Starting point is 01:38:57 know, cornucopia of, of algorithms, including, you know, AI, uh, it's all serving a master fitness function. You know, the thing that they're trying to optimize towards in this case is relevance, whether it's the relevance of a search result or the relevance of an ad. And, you know, and it's this sort of constant battle against bad actors, against new, you know, you're trying to deal with new information, but you're always trying to optimize towards that goal so then i look at facebook and kind of okay so we see that they have a a related uh but somewhat different fitness function you know google's fitness function is we we serve you something up and then you go away right because you if you got the the

Starting point is 01:39:41 the real answer you you went away, right? Whereas Facebook's is if we give you the thing that we really want you to get, you come back and you spend more time, right? So it's almost an inverse. But again, they still have this master fitness function. There is this, you could describe it as engagement. And I kind of talked through fake news

Starting point is 01:40:01 and how you can see how a fitness function can lead you astray. And how Mark right now is sort of saying, oh, wait, you know, the things we told our computer to do, our system, are not what we really meant. And actually, there's a couple of quotes that I can't believe. They've sort of been life quotes for me, and I can't believe that i did not actually put them in the book one of them was this great quote from walt mossberg uh uh you know the famous tech journalist who once said to me years ago he said i told steve ballmer he said if you guys could just dial back the greed only five percent you know people would like you a hundred percent more yeah and uh people wouldn't hate you and and and the other one was this uh

Starting point is 01:40:47 you know quote about debugging uh from a guy named andrew singer who was a a friend of mine who i've seen for many many years but he once said to me he said you know debugging is the art of finding out what you really told your computer to do instead of what you thought you told it to do so in some sense so see like right now you know mark is trying to debug the you know the fitness functions of facebook's engagement paradigm you know so that it you know he's talking about real communities how do we you know support more real communities as opposed to these sort of fake manipulative communities that are contributing to polarization? But when you look at our financial markets, we have that same challenge. We have a master fitness function. And it's sort of interesting to realize that the master fitness function that we had after World War II,

Starting point is 01:41:42 in that golden period of the growing middle class, was actually full employment. They were scared shitless, because after World War I, all those, you know, they'd seen, first of all, in America, you know, you had, you know, all the returning soldiers who were, you know, you know, homeless, you know, whatever, you know, and all this had led to the Great Depression. We saw all this stuff. I mean, it wasn't just the returning soldiers, but it was, so they went into this period where people were out of work and, you know, they saw what happened in, you know, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and they were really focused on putting people to work, you know, and that was all of the policy interventions were around that. And then in the,

Starting point is 01:42:22 you know, the seventies and eighties, it really, you know, we kind of shifted the fitness function to shareholder value. And, you know, kind of if it was good for the stock market, it was good for America. And now we're kind of looking at it and going, oh, that didn't work. And, you know, in some sense, you know, kind of what I'm trying to lay out challenge in the book, I'm trying, you know, a lot of people are saying this, you know, I mean, economists, you know, politicians, whatever, I'm just trying I'm trying, you know, a lot of people are saying this, you know, I mean, economists, you know, politicians, whatever. I'm just trying to make another line of argument reasoning from tech and what we learn from tech platforms, you know, that in a similar way, we have to look at what are we telling our economy to optimize for and realizing that we make choices in that, you know, that the economy, despite all of the ideas of that it's a free market, it isn't at all.

Starting point is 01:43:09 It's a design system and it has all kinds of rules, just like Google has all kinds of rules for, you know, achieving relevance. We have all kinds of rules in our economy that bias it towards the outcomes that we're optimizing for, namely shareholder value. You know, we have tax preferences around capital gains versus how we tax labor. We have rules about whether people can organize. I mean, you know, you know, there's no accident that, you know, labor got a bigger share of the pie when labor organizing was supported as opposed to when it's not, you know, and a lot of things went wrong with unions, you know, and that has to be debugged too. You know, we have to rediscover what it means for people to be able to stand up to, you know, the machines that we built. You know, there's, you know, rules about how much people work, how much time off they get.

Starting point is 01:44:02 And you can see, you know, that there's different,'s different – like just look at German stakeholder capitalism and go, oh, here's a different system with different rules, has different outcomes. You look at the interventionist evolution of the economy in countries like South Korea and you kind of go, yeah, this whole free market thing is just – it's a map and it's not entirely, it's got some great stuff in it. It's just not the whole picture. You know, again, it goes back to Krasivsky. The map is not the territory. So we have to constantly check our map and ask ourselves, are we optimizing for the right

Starting point is 01:44:39 things? What rules should we be changing in order to get a closer to the outcome we really want? And of course, we have to agree on that outcome. But I think we if we want to if we want a human they are, you know, reaching for that better future, working on hard problems, you know, doing, you know, new, you know, inventing new forms of creativity that other people are willing to pay for and building that wonderful fiction that we have. Now I'm back to poetry, you know, Wallace Stevens had this amazing idea that, you know, that reality is, is actually a fiction that we create for each other. That, boy, yeah.

Starting point is 01:45:30 I mean, reality, in quotation marks or not, seems to be, certainly seems to be that case. His great line is, reality is an activity of the most august imagination. One thing that I really love about both reading your work and just speaking with you is how much the new relates to the very, very old and vice versa. And what I mean by that, or even reminds us to re-examine base assumptions.

Starting point is 01:46:00 So for instance, I mean, if we look at, we could look at the fanciest of high-fre, or even some disasters like long term capital management to see how these systems and humans respond to incentives. And if you don't look at them closely enough, the debugging process can be super, super painful, or how cryptocurrency has made people take a closer look if they dig in at what money actually represents. And so I wanted to ask you a question about money, and not on a macroeconomic level, but on a smaller scale. And this is a quote, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, in this quote, money in a business is like gas in your car. You don't want to run out, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations.

Starting point is 01:46:51 That's right. Yeah. So can you elaborate on that? Because there are people certainly who would disagree, right? Or they would not say that life should be a tour of gas stations, but they would assert that maybe the function of business is to generate a profit, and at that, as much profit as humanly possible. Can you explain that position? Yeah, well, I mean, I think... And also, sorry not to interrupt, but also talk a little bit about... You know a lot of very, very, very wealthy people in tech

Starting point is 01:47:23 who have, in some cases, come from very meager backgrounds. I'd love to also hear about the mistakes that you see in your mind as it comes to personally, on a personal or familial level, relating to money or dealing with money. You mean my own mistakes? No, just, well, I think you appear to have a very healthy relationship with this concept of money and money in general. But I'm wondering what – we can come back to that. Why don't we start? I'm asking you like seven questions in one.

Starting point is 01:47:57 Well, let me – I guess I would just sort of say a couple of things one is anybody who thinks that money is the object you know is I'm sad for them because money is a tool you know I mean you know we want happiness we want happiness for ourselves we want it for the people we love and if we're you know great souls we want it for ourselves we want it for the people we love and if we're you know great souls we want it for everybody you know and we should want it for everybody you know i mean and you know the idea you know there is sort of a i think a legitimate debate about the right way to do that and so you know when when you know a people, you know, like we were talking with Russ Roberts, uh, you know, who's, who's a dedicated, you know, libertarian free marketer. I don't know if you've seen his little film, it's a wonderful loaf about, you know, kind of Adam

Starting point is 01:48:54 Smith and his book, how Adam Smith can change your life. You know, these are all kind of, you know, an encomium to this idea that this is magic when You know people just pursue their own aims and it magically produces this wonderful goodness of the economy and I you know, but those people are not pursuing money You know money is a measure of what they are pursuing and so i guess so that's the first piece that i i would say and and then the you know there's sort of obviously there's lots and lots of studies that you know above a certain I think that, you know, in general, you know, happy and prosperous societies are more egalitarian. You know, I mean not – you know, it's not flat.

Starting point is 01:49:58 You know, I mean I don't think – you know, it's sort of interesting because a lot of people kind of go, well, you know, if people aren't allowed to become as rich as, you know, inhumanly possible, then, you know, you're sort of somehow cutting off this sort of capitalist impulse. I go, that's not true. I mean, I just look in my own history, you know, and I think about the people who drove the industry, you know, when I was young and what their expectations were about how much money they would make, you know, and I think of titans of the industry, people like, you know, you know, Pulitzer and Packard or, you know, Gordon Moore and, you know, Andy Grove. And they probably made less money than some punk kid who built and sold a startup that basically vanished as soon as it was sold. You know, I mean, we have people who are billion um you know you know sort of our standard of you know what it means it was that great scene in in the uh you know uh the social network in the movie

Starting point is 01:51:16 you know it was like a million dollars isn't cool you know now a billion dollars now that's cool you know it's just like that's that's vanity you's vanity, you know, that's, you know, vanity. And I just kind of feel that we, you know, um, you know, anyway, I mean, I guess I would say there's sort of a social set of social issues where, you know, self-interest should tell you that if we don't build a more just and equitable society, you know, this system is going to fall down. You know, there are people in North Korea who are doing very well for themselves. There are people in Venezuela who are doing very well for themselves. Right.

Starting point is 01:52:03 But the vast majority of people are living very badly. And that's a failed state. And that's the end game of an economy in which there's this ferocious competition of some people to get as much as possible. And I think the goal for all of us should be to create as much value as possible and to capture enough of it but not all of it and um you know and i i do think that if you see uh you know there's a lot of wonderful i mean one of the things that I do feel like is wonderful about Silicon Valley is there are a lot of people who say, yeah, that's enough. I want to go do something really valuable.

Starting point is 01:52:54 We've tapped into this with Code for America and the United States Digital Service, people saying, okay, I'm going to go to government, you know, or we see in, you know, someone like Jeff Huber at Grail, you know, says, okay, you know, I'm going to try to develop an early detection test for cancer, you know, it's like, I don't need, you know, to go, you know, make another startup, it's going to make a whole bunch of money, maybe he will make a whole bunch of money, but that's not what he's doing, you know, or Elon Musk, what a great example. I mean, Elon put his own money at risk, you know, you know, a lot of it, you know, kind of going, I want to do something really hard that's going to really move the needle about making a better world. And he's done it again and again, you know, whether right or wrong about, you know, we need to become a multi-planetary species. I think he's right. Other people go, oh, we should

Starting point is 01:53:42 be spending the money here on Earth. He's basically, you know, doing something. He's harnessing this machine of the economy, this wonderful machine of capital to do something, to do something. You know, and, you know, it's like he's become rich as a byproduct of what he's trying to accomplish, which is exactly what I mean by you're not doing a tour of gas stations. Meanwhile, there are people, you know, like those people on Wall Street, you know, leading up to 2000, they knew they weren't creating value. They weren't simply trying to extract it. They were doing a tour of gas stations. And I have to say, there are too many people in Silicon Valley who are like that. You know, it's sort of funny because I feel like we call people in Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. And yes, there are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But there are also a lot of people who I think are a lot closer.

Starting point is 01:54:36 If you kind of try to draw the right map, they're a lot closer to actors than they are to entrepreneurs. That is, they're going around looking for a project to attach themselves to, which is funded. It's like substitute venture capitalist for movie studio, right? And you could say, yeah, an actor is an entrepreneur. Yeah, I mean they're basically – they have their – they're driving their own career. But they're basically waiting for somebody to give them money to do this thing, you know? And if they don't get the money, you know, so they're really kind of a special kind of hired employee. And, you know, and that's kind of what we're doing with our venture firm.

Starting point is 01:55:19 My partner, Bryce Roberts, has really kicked off this thing called Indie VC, which is really about how do you build real businesses? Yeah, you might need some money to get started, but mainly you want to get funded by customers. Because I see all these people in Silicon Valley and they basically go from failed startup to failed startup just like an actor goes from one movie to another. You seem to be so forward-looking and so often at the lead edge of various trends and changes that become something seemingly obvious in hindsight. I mean, you're so forward-looking in so many ways. I promised I would come back to this. Why do you read old bestsellers from generations ago? Well, I mean, really just for fun.

Starting point is 01:56:14 How do you pick them if that's the case? Well, you know, it's really, again, one of these pattern recognition things. I mean, I first became conscious of it. It must have been maybe close on 30 years ago. I had dropped my daughter off at a doctor's appointment. And I was, I was, I went for a walk while she was, you know, kind of, actually, maybe I had just gone back to the car and it was starting to rain. And I walked by this bookstore that was going out of business and they had put all these books out on the street.

Starting point is 01:56:49 And it was a box and it's starting to rain. And I see it was like a box of Zane Gray books. And I saw Writers of the Purple Sage. And I thought, I've heard of that. You know, and I couldn't bear to see the books get rained on. So I said, I'm just going to pick them up, put in my car and, you know i'll give them away somewhere else later and i but i pulled that book out and i read it and i loved it you know and i because it's it's just sort of like oh my god this guy kind of invented the mythology of the old west you know and i read a bunch of the other zane gray books that were in

Starting point is 01:57:17 there and uh that was kind of i first started to go oh there's something interesting you know these you know sure there's still they're still popular in a certain way but they're super dated but they're like a time machine into uh you know how people felt you know about the world and you know like right as the purple sage written in you know 1915 i think you know and um and and then you know i i started realizing the same thing about other books that i had read and i you know like started to seek them out you know and uh uh a lot of it was helped by the fact that my my father all the time had a big library and i could kind of read in his library you know and it's like oh you know it's like you know, I'd always seen, you know, the Charlie Chan movies. No, he has a Charlie Chan novel, you know, by James Earl Biggers, you know, and I go,

Starting point is 01:58:10 let me read that. And oh my God, it's like a time machine. It's like the casual racism, you know, it's like, you know, where, you know, people refer to him as the chink, you know, but more than that was just this view that this the one I read, I forget what the title was, but it was the some family from Philadelphia. The daughter has run away to San Francisco and from there to Honolulu, you know, and the view of California, you know, this distant land that sort of kind of the wild, you know, literally the wild west. And then, you know, Honolulu off the edge of the earth, you know, and it's just like this piece of magic where you kind of, you know, see into the past. And then, you know, as I mentioned, Anthony Trollope, you're kind of looking into the depths of life in the Victorian era or, or, uh, but what I find that sort of interesting, uh, and I, I started

Starting point is 01:59:08 to seek out our books that are largely forgotten because, you know, or, or they have some, you know, some piece of them has survived, but they haven't survived, you know, like everybody knows Charles Dickens, you know? Um, but you know, only a certain number of people will have read, uh, George Du Maurier's, uh, Trilby. Right. But almost everybody knows, uh, uh, well, maybe not everybody. I'm probably showing off too much, uh, literary, but you know, they've heard about mesmerism and they've heard about a Spangali. Right. Well, Spangali is a character in George Du Maurier's book. Right. Trilby, which is and it's about mesmerism and the way mesmerism was this sort of, you know, hypnotism was, you know, this rage through Victorian society, you know, in the 1890s. You know, we was fascinated by it. And it was just, it's like,

Starting point is 02:00:07 I guess it'd be a little bit like reading more recently Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or something from Thomas Pynchon, kind of getting into the world of psychedelia and that era of the 70s, right? Or for that matter, reading, there will be a time when somebody could read Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker, and it will be a time machine into this place

Starting point is 02:00:40 when our financial economy went crazily wrong. And guess what? There's actually a novel about that by Anthony Trollope called The Way We Live Now about, you know, the great railroad bubbles of the 1860s. And so, you know, in some ways, fiction is also a key part of uh you know a way to learn about history uh in a way that's a little deeper because one of the things that i think we're not very good at is um you know we rewrite history all the time so if you read a modern, you're reading what we think about it now. You know, so you could read an old book of history, but when you read a novel, you are reading how people thought, what they were struggling with. You know, you read a book like

Starting point is 02:01:38 another Trollope that I love, Can You Forgive Her? It's this sort of proto-feminist novel about these women who made choices that were unconventional in who they would marry, you know? And the fact that that was even an issue, you know? But yeah, we kind of look back on that, but it's like, oh my God, you can see it, you know, as a moral struggle. And he's kind of trying to set you up to say, yes, you can forgive her, you know? didn't marry the the the socially approved guy you know and it's like you know like it just gives you a deeper insight into you know our own world because one of the things that we're and this kind of brings me back to you you know, Korsivsky, the structural differential, the map is not the territory, my training with George Simon. You know, learning to see our own world in the same way, you know, that, you know, the things that we take for granted will, you know, we will one day look back on, or other people will look back on and say, how quaint.

Starting point is 02:02:50 And in our own lives, our daily lives, the ability to sort of go, oh wait, this way that I have always been may not be the only way to be that I can change. So seeing change is, is, is a prelude to being changed. So this, this I think is a great place to, to start to wrap up. And I have this question I've been wanting to ask since we started, but I think that it's more, the answer will be more impactful now that we've covered a lot of the context. What do you do? You strike me, and I think many people is extremely optimistic, extremely upbeat. What do you do? Or what have you done when you felt down or been going through periods of darker times? Because there are a lot of people who would like to be change of some type,

Starting point is 02:03:47 but they feel intimidated or depressed for whether it's personal reasons or because every time they open the newspaper, it looks like the world is falling apart in every possible respect. Mm-hmm. What do you do when you aren't your usual upbeat, optimistic self if that happens? Yeah. Well, you know, one of the – since I gave homage in the opening to Sesame Street, I have to give a little homage also to the other wonderful teacher of children, Mr. Rogers. And by the way, before I had kids kids i thought mr rogers this is the stupidest thing ever once you have kids you go oh my god this guy was a genius yeah i mean you know just i you know to me i just he was a genius but anyway and i i have there's a video of him of him

Starting point is 02:04:43 doing congressional testimony once. I forget what was the reason. It was sort of – it was about the early days of PBS. And you watch this congressman who's sort of hostile in the beginning just sort of gradually just sort of start nodding and smiling. It's so great. But I digress. But the great thing to your question is this fabulous quote from fred rogers where he said you know on his show he's telling joan when you see bad things happen look around for the people

Starting point is 02:05:11 who are helping there are always people helping and you know it's just such great life advice you know it's like you know and i just actually just tweeted something like that the other day. I had just come across – there was a new video about Planet Labs, one of my companies I'm an investor in. They're trying to image the surface of the earth every day. They call their satellites doves. They said like all these military satellites, they all have names of rapt, names of raptors, and we wanted ours to, you know, signal that they're for peace, you know, and there's this great piece about their, you know, their launch of the largest, you know, flock of earth imaging satellites, and, you know, I just kind of posted it with, I think the tweet was something like, you know, if you need your

Starting point is 02:06:01 dose of optimism, you know, you know, watch this video, you know, because here's somebody who's, you know, doing something idealistic, maybe it was I said your dose of idealism, you know, kind of so look for people who are helping the world be a better place. Well, Tim, I think you are one of those people. And we could talk for hours and hours more, but I will, I think, bring this one to a close. But first, so people can find you elsewhere, learn more about you and the book and everything else that you are up to, where would you suggest people find you on the internet? Well, probably the best place right now is a site called tim.oreilly.com. It's a sub-site of oreilly.com, which is our online learning platform, which includes tens of thousands of e-books mostly on technology and business topics but increasingly other things, but also videos, live training. It's really the core of our entire business.

Starting point is 02:07:06 But Tim.orelli.com sort of has, it's sort of my personal archive of, you know, for example, a link to this podcast will go on there once it's up. It also points to my book. There will be a site for the book, but it's not up yet. The site will be called WTFeconomy.com and and i think the book is is something that it's uh uh it's really covers a lot of the topics we talked about today but also a lot more i mean there's a lot about how you think how to how to draw a map of your business model and how to think about uh you know you know the implications you know for example i spent a lot of time on okay dissecting the business model of uber and ly and then saying, what does this teach us about their story about self-driving cars? You know, like if you draw a correct map of the world, it tells you something about the future.

Starting point is 02:07:55 And so anyway, so, you know, I would say go to Tim.O'Reilly.com and from there you'll find everything else. And then on best place to say hello on social, would that be at O'Reilly Media? No, at Tim O'Reilly on Twitter. At Tim O'Reilly. And I do see all my at messages. And also, I respond to email. And if you know my name, you can guess my email. Well, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time.

Starting point is 02:08:27 This was really fun for me. And I have a reading list as long as my arm, which I'm prepared to dig into. Is there anything, any question or suggestion, suggested action that you would have for people listening before we completely wrap up well uh i guess the the biggest advice i would have is so try to create a daily practice where you stop thinking and start listening to nothing and And some people would call that meditation.

Starting point is 02:09:07 But it could be just, you know, like when you go, you know, if you go for a run, don't think. Just let things come into your head. You know, if you, you know, sit by a fire or go sailing, those are good activities for letting that happen. Going for a very, very long walk till all the thoughts fall away because you're cultivating that um that head space and that soul space where uh you're not filling it up with the stuff you already have you already know but are just uh listening it's that that Morgan's Tarot card, always remember this, the space that lets stuff come into you and surprise you and give you new thoughts and give rise to curiosity.

Starting point is 02:09:59 I think that is the perfect place to wrap up. Tim, thank you so much again. I really appreciate you taking the time. Everybody should check out everything, including your writing on Medium. You had a great piece on how you separate out fake news from real news that I think should be required reading.

Starting point is 02:10:19 So much more that we can dig into. So thank you, first and foremost. And to everybody listening, you can find the show notes, so links to everything that we've discussed, including Tim's new book and everything else, in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast, along with every other episode. So just check those out at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And as always, and until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one,

Starting point is 02:10:50 this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off

Starting point is 02:11:32 for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #278: Tim O'Reilly - The Trend Spotter

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.