#315: John Coogan – Why Does The Media Hate Tech?

Hello and welcome. My guest today is John Coogan. John is the co founder of Luci and the co founder of Soylent.

He is also the creator of a.

YouTube channel with over 257,000 subscribers. In this conversation we spoke about why Paul Graham played a critical role in John's life. Early stories from his days at Y Combinator, what his YouTube channel has given him, why he's optimistic about the future, and much more. John is a really sharp dude and he's clearly got a pulse for where the world is going. This episode is brought to you by Arthi and Sriram's Good Time Show. You can find conversations with founders, athletes, technologists who have made it from being outsiders to insiders. Past guests of their show include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Osaka, Gary Vaynerchuk. So many more incredible minds and human beings.

If you enjoy this show, you'll probably.

Enjoy theirs as well because episode 275 was me interviewing Aarthi and Sriram. And they are brilliant, they're wise, they ask incredible questions and they've spent a lot of time thinking about where the world is going. So check out Arthian Sriram's Good time show on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, linked below. But now this is my conversation with John Coogan.

Like left unchecked, YouTube will be just as negative as the mainstream media. And the reason is because all the same forces apply. Like the people that sign up for newspaper subscriptions are the same people that watch videos and click on ads. So if a piece of content that says ChatGPT is terrible for society, if that does really well and converts a bunch of newspaper subscribers, it probably will also do well on YouTube and convert a bunch of people to some brand sponsorship.

John, welcome to the podcast. Really grateful and honored for you being here. Really admire your work and I'm excited to dive into your story here today.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. So good. Good to be.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to start with your header for I believe your LinkedIn, which is founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, is the book you're reading. Is there any particular significance to that being your header?

Yeah, I think so in the sense that back in college I bounced around a lot and I feel like I really, really dodged a bullet by landing in kind of the YC community. And what I mean by that is that I went to kind of a weird college, Northeastern University in Boston, and when I was there it was a five year program where you take six months off every few semesters to do a co op and you actually work full 40 hours a week at a company. So a company can basically treat this like intern instead of like a summer intern. They have someone from January to July and then from August to December, so they have full time coverage. So they can kind of create like a real role and it gives you like a better experience of what, of what working at a company is like. The problem is that I just hated everywhere I worked basically, and it was just not for me whatsoever. But I worked in a really, really w range of places. Like, I worked for a really small 50 person Series B startup that was actually pretty cool. I worked at a venture capital firm that was like three people. I worked all the way for like a life insurance company. There was like thousands of people. It was in like the Fortune 100. I worked for the government at one point in the Census Bureau doing stuff over there. And like, it was just a lot of different experiences. I think by the time I graduated, I had like four or five different jobs that was like kind of picking from on my resume. And my. I studied economics and kind of the default path would have been to go into finance of some sort. And I just, at the last second kind of had a career advisor who was like, you don't need a job. Like, you should go and look into kind of entrepreneurship. And I'd been working. So they recommended that I work at this really small seed stage venture capital firm that had like $10 million under management, which is like super nothing. But there they were writing like very, very small seed checks into companies. And I met some of the founders and I could kind of tell that they were very much making it up as they went along. And then I started reading PG Paul.

Graham for those unfamiliar.

Yeah, reading Paul Graham, reading Hacker News and getting into kind of understanding what was going on in Y Combinator. And so after college, I went out to Silicon Valley. I moved in with another team that was doing yc. We were doing a, we were doing a program that eventually got merged into yc, but it was the same structure. So it was three months. You show up, they give you a little bit of money, you have to build something and then demo it to investors on demo day. And as soon as I got there, it was like, okay, this is like what I was meant to do. And so, yeah, I've just always had a very deep respect for founders. But I think that, I don't know, I think that it takes a while to kind of understand like what entrepreneurship is in a sense. Like, I don't know, maybe I just didn't, like, I didn't really internalize it when I was a kid that like, these things come from, like everything you use comes from someplace or somewhere. Like, I remember when Facebook got built, I just thought it was like a website and I thought it was. I thought it was the equivalent of like a website that I would build. You know, it was just like a little more complicated. You don't think of it as like, oh, there's like a thousand people working every day in this big organization when you're a kid. But Paul Graham and the Y Combinator community kind of like unlocks a piece of understanding. Before you see some huge entrepreneur on the news, there's this path that gets followed. And that was just fascinating to me. So, yeah, that was just kind of deep respect for the YC team forever.

What about Paul Graham's essays hit you so deeply?

Hmm. I think, I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I can kind of describe the opposite, which is what a lot of people were putting out into the world. It's kind of like that, that, like, that like TED Talky vibe that's like very, very polished and very much just, oh, just sit back. The future is coming. Like, the flying cars will be here any minute. Don't worry. Like, you don't have to work at it. Like, the future's cool. We're going to solve all these things, these problems, but like, they're just going to get done. It's very abstract and, and there's nothing. And, and Paul Graham's like, much more methodical with the idea that being a founder is extremely hard work. There's a whole host of skills that need to come together. I love this quote where he says that building a startup usually requires four or five completely different skill sets to come together. You might need to know programming and then sales and then also some interesting financial engineering thing and then some interesting, you know, marketing or branding trick. And you need to bring all of those together to make the thing actually work. And ideally you find that in just two co founders or like two or three co founders. And, and no one had really broken it down like that before. And that really. And I think he was like the first. He was the first person because before Paul Graham, I'd read a little bit of Tim Ferriss and I liked the four Hour Workweek, but it was very much focused on like the lifestyle business side of entrepreneurship. Very, very individual, very. Just kind of like, oh, go build a business. But like, you're basically going to do it Alone with, like, your virtual assistant who's going to be in, like, the Philippines. And Paul Graham was actually talking about, like, how big companies get built. And that was very, very interesting because I feel like the. A lot of people focus on the economic outcomes from different businesses. They might say, like, oh, look, you could go and try and start the next Google, but there's a 99% chance that you fail and you'll wind up without that much money. It's much better just to start a lifestyle business where you can make a million dollars a year. That's way better. But I think that. I don't know, I think that the economic impact and the scale of the companies is actually a pretty good proxy for, like, the impact that that company is having on the world. And so I. There's this joke, there's this question on Twitter that people ask a lot where it's like, would you rather have 100% ownership of a $10 million business or a 1% ownership of $1 billion business? Like, assuming you founded them? And it's supposed to be like, don't give up dilution. Like, be. Be, you know, in charge. Like, it's good to have complete control. And like, I don't know, I think it might be better to start the thing that's worth a billion dollars and has a big impact and then bring a lot of people along on that ride. Create a bunch of jobs, have a bunch of co founders, like, maybe 1% dilutions. Way too much. But, you know, I don't see that as a failure in this in the same way that a lot of other people do.

Do you always felt that way. As soon as you came upon Tim Ferriss, you were immediately like, all right, this is not. This is cool, but this is not for me. And you came upon Paul Graham and the idea of entrepreneurship, and you're like, all right, I want to dream big. Because if I remember me thinking about both of those scenarios at that age, it was like, dude, I just want the easy path. Give me the easy path.

Yeah.

So what was it for, from your perspective?

Yeah, I mean, I. I think. I think I kind of understood that. I. Yeah, I wanted to be involved in something, in something bigger. And I liked. A lot of the Tim Ferriss books are great in terms of just that early development of kind of the hustle that's required to get something off the ground. There is a lot of value there, but it doesn't talk enough about scaling, in my opinion. And that's where Paul Graham, I think, was really really key in talking about laying the foundations for, for massive, massive growth. And a big part of that is working with venture capitalists. I remember hearing Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, talk about his story and he was talking about how well he started this firm and it was going pretty well. And then he was talking to Marc Andreessen. He was saying, as you know, Mark, if you don't, if you don't scale your capital, like you're not going to get very far. And he just said it's like so matter of factly, but it really is true. Like, like the, the, the number of companies that have like an outsized impact on the world that don't figure out how to effectively work with the financial markets is very, very low. It's very, very low. I think there's something where it's like, you know, 99% of 99% of venture capital startups fail, but 99% of the, of the market cap of the public markets is of companies that took venture capital, something like that. Those might not be the exact numbers, but it really, it really shows you that like every big company that we know of, like they all, they all figured out how to work with the capital markets because it just accelerates everything.

What might not, what might people not realize about venture capital and about yc?

Yeah, I mean, I think like, it's important to understand the history of like why Paul Graham's blog was kind of revolutionary was because it was from this founder perspective and it was kind of pulling back the curtain on this world that had been very predatory. There are tons of examples of venture capitalists coming in and taking like 80% of the company for $1 million. And even just a few years ago, I remember talking to entrepreneurs who'd say, oh yeah, an investor came to me and said, I love what you're doing. I'd love to put in a million dollars to help you get the business off the ground. How about we make it even? Let's go 50, 50. And it's like 50% dilution in the first round is kind of unheard of in Silicon Valley. We normally deal with more like 20%, 10%, 30%, something like that. So just, just kind of laying a foundation for working with venture capitalists effectively so that you don't get taken advantage of. Was, was very revolutionary. And then, I mean, I like to think of YC in some ways as like, it's like a union for entrepreneurs where there's, where there's such a huge network effect and there's so many different Companies all in this YC network that if a venture capitalist screws over one company, they can get a bad reputation and be excluded from the entire startup community.

You spent some time in YC and I'm curious what were the biggest learnings or lessons that surprised you and the stories that go along with it? Because if I'm not mistaken, you started in the 2013. 2012, yeah, 2012. So you must have seen some incredible companies get built Coinbase and seen the founders. Yeah. So what was that like in the Erodis?

I mean, it was remarkable. I moved to Coinbase. That was a wild journey. I wasn't super close with them or anything, but you could just kind of see that there was these huge waves in crypto and massive winters. And I talked to Brian at one party and yeah, he was saying like, it is a marathon. And I think at that point, like it was maybe post, post 2017 crash or something. Prices were down and stuff, but he was just continuing to build. And then like the latest bull run and it just went to the moon and like it's, it's just wild. That was a very interesting company. And then OpenSea was in my other batch in 2018. So like two of the biggest crypto companies, like, of all time are like, you know, I'm like sitting right there basically, is remarkable. But yeah, I mean, they were also like zapier. Do you know that company that was also in the same batch as Coinbase and like a wildly different path where they barely raised any money and got really, really big and fully remote and just a very, very different culture there, I think. I mean, the most basic takeaway from YC is just that you see an incredible amount of competition. So you're in this environment, you see everyone's, you know, they're, they're showing up every week. Who has the most traction and momentum is very clear. So that's just a very. It's just a competitive environment. Like if you're the type of person that like to play competitive sports and would thrive in those environments, like if you, if you can run faster in a race than just around the track, like, you're going to do really well. I think that's probably true for entrepreneurship broadly, like competitive edge and, and competitors tend to do well. But I mean, in terms of like the actual lessons, I mean, PG does put out a lot of stuff on his blog. It's pretty good. But I remember he did come because I was in this other incubator that was like affiliated loosely and he came and gave A talk. And it was just like very, just like inspiring to just be in the same room with a small group and kind of like hear somebody say like, yeah, like I have watched this pattern play out again and again and again. And it can be done. You just have to like work hard. It was just like a pump up speech basically and it was like extremely valuable. I don't know that there was any like, you know, crazy unlock. Like, oh, there's one weird trick that you can do to just immediately make money. It's like, no, it's a lot of hard work, but sometimes all you need is like competition and encouragement.

Who were some of the most important competitors for you during that time?

I mean, it's like not, it's not like specific companies or anything like that. It's like, oh, this guy showed up and had built something cool. So I went back and built another cool thing and spent extra time learning Python or getting better at iOS development or something like that. It was like it was motivating to go in advance most of that time in 2012 because I studied economics in college, most of that time was really just the best way to learn programming because in any other environment either if I'd gone and tried to get a job at Google, they would have been like, you can't code so you're a sales guy or something. And I would have been like, oh, well, now I can't learn to code. Or like there just was not, there wasn't really a clear path. But by going into, you know, entrepreneurship, it was like, oh, anything that you need to do, like, you just have to learn how to do it and then just go do it. So it was very freeing from a perspective of like, I wanted to go deep into computer science and learn programming and like the YC environment, like definitely created the space for that where I could be. I was terrible when I joined and I was pretty good by the time I, by the time I finished because I was just like shipping code every single day, like building projects constantly.

Super cool. What are the similarities between scuba diving, computer graphics and gaming?

That's a good question. There aren't that many. I could try and come up with some crazy bank shot thing, but I think they're just three things that I kind of fell in love with early and have continued to work on. Like with scuba diving. I had a cousin who was a marine biologist who was, you know, researching manatees and I just thought it was super cool. I'd always wanted to be an astronaut, obviously. Who doesn't? But I found out that the astronauts trained for zero G and scuba diving. So it's like, hey, you can kind of get the astronaut vibe from scuba diving. And then I just really like scuba diving. It's just a very peaceful. You're weightless, you're just floating there. It's very meditative. It's just a great sport. It's safe. It's like once you know how to do everything, it's very safe. Like you're not going to come away with like an injury, like, oh, I tore my hamstring or I ran into a tree. Like it's, it's. Once you know how to do everything, it's very simple. It's great on vacation, beautiful locations, you know, it's very easy. And then computer graphics, kind of similar. I mean, computer graphics probably came out of the video gaming. I mean video gaming is just like, okay, I was a kid, I played video games. Who didn't? And then that evolved into like, okay, now we're going to mod the game, we're going to change the game, we're going to build our own levels, we're going to develop our own stuff and tweak things and then took a course on computer graphics and then really, really got into computer graphics with my second company because I wanted to create marketing collateral very, very quickly. This was a long time ago, before we had artificial intelligence that could just generate you an image of exactly what you wanted. So you either had to take a photo of it or you had to render it. And so when you're an early stage startup and you don't have product made, iterating on the photography is really, really critical. And so computer graphics allows you to kind of create a mock up, light it, render it, get a photo or an animation and then put that out on the Internet and see if people want it. So it just kind of like, it was just a way to short circuit the feedback loop essentially of testing and iterating something that like, I mean, you see it all the time now. If you go on Instagram, like there's plenty of ads that are clearly 3D rendered and it's pretty commoditized. But I actually love the, the experience of building something in 3D. It's a really, really cool, just a fun experience. It's very much like coding. You can write software to automate a lot of it. There's pieces of software in there. The more you know about software, the easier it'll be to pick up. But then there's this other side of artistry and Actually making something look good. And that's something that, like, it's really, really hard. That was the hardest thing for me to learn was like the lighting, understanding what looks good, understanding the principles of cinematography. Because I hadn't even really used a camera that much. And in 3D you have to use a virtual camera. So Most of the 3D artists, they come from creative fields, they come from photography or videography and then they eventually learn 3D software. I kind of came at it from the other direction of like a software engineer learning it. But it was really fun because it's a lot faster. Like the reason I can understand where to put these lights to make myself look like this is because in 3D you can just move them around instantly and they don't cost anything. If you want a really, really big light, you can just scale it up instead of having to pay for a bigger light.

Yeah. This is something that I notice in everything that you do. It always looks good. Whether that's like the marketing campaigns for lucy or your YouTube channel or just even your background right now for those watching, it looks spectacular and it looks like it can draw you in.

Yeah.

And that's such a competitive advantage in today's day and age because everybody is trying to capture attention and the things that look good are the things that our eyes will go to. So design is such a critical skill in the modern day world. What advice do you have for people who aren't that good at design to get better at it?

I mean, I was terrible at it. I had no. I was like the worst at art in high school. Like couldn't get the pottery wheel working and like everything was a disaster with me.

I relate.

But then, I mean, eventually I just got. I think it's like you need to find that hook to get motivated to start creating. And for me it was like this really weird Reddit that I found called like high effort memes. I think it was called like high Effort memes or higher gifs. And it was basically like they would take, they would take like movie clips and then they would go into after effects and like track text into the clip and do all these really crazy edits on like the movie clip, all to make like a very dumb joke about like the Reddit itself. It was all self referential. But I got into that and was really interested in like, oh cool, you can like manipulate, manipulate video with after effects and started. So I would just like, oh, we went on a vacation. I'd make like a little travel vlog just for like me and my family and just finding little creative outlets where you can go and learn that are very low risk, that was really important. And then just kind of like getting in the flow of like consuming the content that will help you learn the new skills. So like I watch, I watched a ton of cinematography videos, I watched a ton of just critiques, lighting critiques for film and television and learned all about the history of computer graphics and all the different technologies that could kind of make something look better. And then you just have to practice. It just takes a long time. Even now I see there's a lot that this could be much better.

I'm sure once you know the secrets, it makes you think like, oh, I can improve it these ways. Other than design, what are some of the other core skills that people might look over when they look at your career and what you've done and say, ah, they might not realize that you were actually good at this thing and that thing is part of the reason why you succeeded.

I think the, I think, I mean the unique blend that I bring to YouTube that I think is like my unfair advantage that allows, that creates a defensibility is that I studied economics, I can program, and I'm a Silicon Valley founder and I've actually raised money from like real venture capital firms and built like venture backed startups. So that that unique blend is very, very rare. It's not that it's better than anything else, it's just like it's a unique weird surface area that, that there aren't that many people that are in that specific niche. So what that allows me to do is yeah, I could write software, I don't write a ton of software, but I can at least understand how software gets written and I can critique software projects which are the things that we're talking about every single day now that every tech product is in the mainstream news. But I can also understand the economics behind it and understand the business. And then I can also speak to the founder side and read between the lines. I think that's the most important thing is just reading between the lines. Because a lot of the tech press is written from a journalist perspective and those folks don't have experience actually interfacing with venture capitalists or entrepreneur engaging in entrepreneurship themselves. So they tend not to understand what's actually going on. When the founder says how are things going? And they say it's going great or something, I've been there and I kind of, I can read between the lines and I can know exactly what's going on or oh, Somebody got screwed here, somebody's upset with somebody, or there's a reason why we haven't heard from this person or whatever, can kind of understand it.

Yeah. Why does the media in general paint technology as a bad thing?

That is an extremely deep question. It's an extremely deep question. I think there are a lot of reasons. We could talk about this for hours, but I mean the most vanilla explanation is that there's a pendulum that swings back and forth. And in 2008, 2009, 2010, tech was like this cool, fresh thing. We got the iPhone, we just got so many delightful things that the tech press was just adoring. They were just time and time again a new, oh, this founder's going to change the world world. And then you had the TED Talk circuit where people were saying, oh, we're going to cure world hunger with this, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And it was just over and over and over again. And we just started with, let's give them benefit of the doubt. And then of course things kind of took longer. We didn't get the self driving car yet, like all these different timelines missed and so that kind of shifted. But I think that you could go a lot deeper too and just talk about technological stagnation and how tech hasn't been delivering in the world of atoms, it's only been delivering in software. We haven't really been seeing any progress in the physical world, in innovation. If you look around, things kind of look like the 1970s except for the screens. Everything else hasn't really advanced that much. Peter Thiel likes to talk about the like, we're not moving faster, we're actually getting slower. We used to be able to take the Concorde supersonic from New York to London in three hours. And now the average speed of the airplanes in the America has gone down to like 550 miles an hour. It's getting slower. And then you add in TSA and we're moving even slower. So you know, all these different, all these different things like obviously like energy and there's just so many different areas where tech has kind of underdog delivered. And then there's a lot of questions about, okay, why is that, is it regulation? Is it some fundamental physics property? Is it just capital formation or inspiration? Are we just not encouraging the geniuses to build the right thing or are we limiting them somehow? It's very unclear. But I mean, I think that that's kind of the story of the tech press. I think that I Mean, there's also the factor that, like, they're under a lot of pressure to make money because obviously they're losing ad revenue. So there's questions about maybe negative content does better. Why is that? Are people depressed? We can turn this into a psychology podcast if you want. Like, you can peel back this onion for like hours and hours. Like there's no, there's no end to where we wind up.

And yet, despite all of that, you describe yourself as a tech optimist.

Yes.

At least in your Twitter bio.

Yes.

And I would consider myself the same as well. But why do you consider yourself a techno optimist?

Yeah, I mean, I think just fundamentally, historically, technology has been a net good. Every technology has had some negative to it. Obviously. Like you, you look at cruise ship technology, well, the Titanic happened, but then also people got to enjoy cruises and they got to move around the world faster. And same thing with planes and really any technology. Social media, it's very in vogue to say, oh, social media is destroying people's brains and it's so bad. But I still think it's probably a net good. It's probably adding to a lot of people's lives in terms of entertainment, education and connection and, and helping people stay connected to each other. It's still probably doing a lot of good. Although that's controversial to say now. But in general, it feels like we've been very good at developing technologies and finding the right implementation of them. That does have a positive effect on society over the long term. I think the bigger question is I definitely believe that, that there's a lot more to unlock. It's just like, I'm not entirely, like, devil may care, just go out and build everything. But I definitely think that there's a lot of, of good that can come from it. I refuse to believe in like the, you know, like, there's nothing more to do in tech, like we're done theory because, like, nuclear power is just so obvious to me. Like, it's safe, it's abundant, like, we can just make a ton of energy very, very efficiently and it would be clean and amazing. And so the fact that we haven't gone and done nuclear at scale yet is a huge reason for techno optimism, in my opinion. And really, really, it really drives home the idea that there's something that we're not at the physical limits of what's possible. There is an argument that might say, you know, time travel might never be possible, or faster than light speeds travel might never be possible. But like, we know that we can get to the moon. So like we should be able to go to the moon whenever we want. We know that we can get to Mars. Like we've put a helicopter on that just recently. Like so we should be able to go there regularly. Like the reason that we aren't doing these things is not some fundamental physics science problem in my opinion. It's either a coordination problem or a regulation problem or an economic problem. I recently posted a poll asking what do you think will come first? Artificial general intelligence, like computers as smart as humans or a man on Mars. And it was exactly 50 50. It was bizarre. But I think that kind of makes sense because the AGI feels so much harder than going to Mars. Like we can, we could shoot someone to Mars right now. We could just yeet someone to Mars and they would be there and they'd be screwed. But all you need is one person who's crazy enough to be like, yeah, I'll go live on Mars for the rest of my life. And you could do it essentially. Like it's not that difficult. We can clearly land a human safely on Mars, but there's no economic incentive for that and there's no, there's no industry that's going to build around that. But like when you think about the forces to create AGI, it's like Microsoft's investing billions and billions of dollars in this stuff. There's such a huge infrastructure of people that want to benefit from AI, so there's all these different interesting problems that we have to work through. But fundamentally I think it's pretty clear that there's just so much opportunity for technology to increase prosperity.

Why Is Microsoft investing $10 billion in ChatGPT?

I mean it's very clear that it's will just improve all of their products. Like use the, use ChatGPT for five seconds and you're like, this is a great writing partner. This should be embedded in Word. And then you look at some of the stuff that it can do. GPT3. I've seen implementations in Google Sheets and Excel where it can auto fill things. It's just clearly like it's hugely complimentary with their office suite, drafting emails. I mean we already have some autocomplete in Gmail. It guesses the next few words like why not just populate the whole thing? So that seems extremely logical for them and I think it makes a ton of sense that they would do that.

Makes sense. I'd love to talk to you about YouTube in general and why you've spent so much time there and particularly devoting yourself to creating videos at the highest level, it seems like, what went into the decision to start putting yourself out on YouTube?

I mean, the simple answer is just like, it was the pandemic. I was bored and I had free time for the first time in a decade. I'd been an entrepreneur for 10 years, basically, and you're normally really busy, you don't have time for side projects. But then the pandemic came and I didn't have anything to do on the weekend because there were literally no events. So decided to turn on the camera and just kind of talk. And I figured that I didn't know exactly what would come of it, but I had a feeling that if I just let it snowball for a couple years, it would get big and it would be valuable in one way or another. At the very least, I'd be able to meet other people. And that happened almost instantly. Like, you put something out on. You put an analysis of a topic out on YouTube, someone is searching for that and then they email you, hey, I want to talk about this topic. Because you're the only person that's talking about this. So that happened very quickly, like the serendipity machine kind of idea. And then, yeah, I mean, I think in the long term, like there will be some sort of business model. It clearly is good at attracting young entrepreneurs, attracting the next generation of technologists. So there's probably some way to like monetize it at some point. I've already made investments in startups that have met me through the YouTube channel, which is cool. That's kind of a proof point for the project. But then also, I mean, to get to your point of like the negative tech press, this is something people don't understand, is that they see a negative thing about tech in the mainstream media and they think that, oh, independent media on YouTube will solve this automatically. But that's not the case at all. Like, left unchecked, YouTube will be just as negative as the mainstream media. And the reason is because all the same forces apply. Like, the people that sign up for newspaper subscriptions are the same people that watch videos and click on ads. So if a piece of negative tech content, if a piece of content that says ChatGPT is terrible for society, if that does really well and converts a bunch of newspaper subscribers, it probably will also do well on YouTube and convert a bunch of people to some brand sponsorship. So that force is constant. It doesn't matter that one, the mainstream media is like a large Corporation and the YouTuber is like a small individual. Creator with like some single member LLC that doesn't matter. Like, what matters is the economic incentives. And they're both, they're both incentivized the same. So kind of saw that YouTube was very, very negative and I wanted to kind of pull things back in the other direction, ideally. So a lot of my content is framed almost in the negative to attract those type of people who might be clicking on negative content. But then once they get deeper into the video, they find out that I'm actually making an optimistic argument about the technology. And then maybe I convince them and maybe I change their opinion, but it takes a lot of work. And I don't really know if there's the benefit from that, like increasing techno optimism in the world. What is the return from that? How do you measure that? It's very difficult. But I mean, in general, if I can wind up making someone more techno optimistic and then they go and build something really cool, then I wind up with that really cool thing. I often think about Jeff Bezos and I probably have the same phone. We probably our favorite movie, like his favorite movie I've probably seen. Right. Because, like, he doesn't have access to, like, different things than me. He has access to like the private plane and I don't. But like, but like, for a lot of our experiences, they're actually very similar. And so encouraging people to create cool stuff. Oftentimes the cool stuff that they create gets very, very evenly distributed throughout the world.

I think it's such a. What you're doing is so important because how we view technology is ultimately the future that we'll create. And if we think technology is going to destroy us and it's the end of all times, there are going to be a lot less people creating stuff and building stuff. Whereas if in India their media is saying technology is a force for good, they're going to end up in a much higher position, relatively speaking, than we are in the United States in 50 years, because they just had a different belief in their head about what was possible. So that's why I bring up, you know, the opinions and perspectives of media on technology, because I think it might be the most important thing for United States prosperity. But honestly, global prosperity over a long enough time horizon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It's. Yeah. I mean, it's just like it's. The only option is to kind of build your way out of, out of a problem. Yeah. What's odd is that you often see with the, with the techno pessimistic crowd is that they'll simultaneously make the argument that, like, technology is bad and we shouldn't work to develop new technologies, but also the status quo is not that good. They'll often say, like, things are bad right now. It would be very different if someone was saying, like, no, actually, things are perfect. I have no complaints. The government's amazing. Everything's perfect. Society is great. We don't need anything new. But I've never heard anyone make that argument. They always say, like, everything sucks, and also the future sucks. It's like, okay, I don't know what to tell you. Like, you want nothing.

Yeah. The problem is you. And, yeah, I mean, a lot of.

These people are just, like, depressed and nihilistic. Like, there's just nothing you can do.

The belief in the potential for a greater future is everything. I was listening to Sam Altman talk about how optimism is the most important trait and that he. He tries to spend as much time as possible, which. With optimists. And that's an obvious thing when you talk to a fellow optimist, but it's not that obvious when you're. When most of the world is pessimistic. Well, did. Have you done anything in your own life to help you be more optimistic?

I've thought about this a lot, and I've thought that. I mean, I think it's probably a very complex set of factors that go into, like, creating an optimistic mindset, right? It's like, you can't be suffering from, like, food scarcity. You have to be healthy. There's a lot of different. Like, we can just go through, like, the basic, like, you know, like, have a family, work out, eat healthy, don't use drugs. Like, don't have. Don't indulge in vices too much. Like, we could just do a podcast on, like, living a good lifestyle, and that would probably lead to, like, an optimistic outcome. But I think that you can in some ways just, like, tell yourself, like, I am an optimist. Like, let me really focus on the. On finding optimistic solutions at every possible time. And just train yourself to think about things that way and almost just see it as a game. So, like, any problem that you're like. I mean, comedians kind of do this where, like, you can throw. If you're hanging out with a comedian, like, you could throw, like, any news story at them, and they'll be constantly thinking, like, how can I think of a funny riff on this? And they're doing that, like, kind of naturally, but also kind of because it's their job, right? And they get paid when they come up with something funny. And if you think about yourself in technology, you could kind of do the same thing where you could. You could say, like, okay, I'm just going to try and find the most optimistic take on anything. It's funny because I feel like there are a lot of people in tech who. Who. Maybe I'm not just a tech optimist, but maybe I'm just an optimist generally. But I find that a lot of people right now, they complain about a lot of things, and I really try not to. People would complain about the White Lotus or Glass Onion wasn't that good. Or the new Avatar movie wasn't that good. I saw all those. They were fine. They were good. I liked them. It was fine. Like, I try and, like, have a good experience, and I don't know. Like, I just. Like, I'm sure if I. If my job was to find flaws with Avatar, I could find them and I could tell you how it's not that good, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, like, no, like, I personally want to have a good experience in life, so I feel like I kind of try and look on the bright side, I guess is like, the cliche, right? And just forcing myself to do that results in a really, really great outcome. Like, it's a really great lifestyle. Like, I just actually enjoy life.

It's so funny that you say it like that because you've also said before that you like being uncomfortable, and this is a quote from you. I've kind of rewired my brain to only be satisfied if I'm uncomfortable or failing or making something bad. As soon as I start making something really good, I think, okay, I need to be less comfortable. So there's an interesting paradox there between wanting to feel uncomfortable and also looking at the bright side of the future.

Well, I mean, I think there's actually more of a similarity there, which is like. Which is like being uncomfortable and then looking on the bright side, right? So, like, constantly feeding that cycle through where you do something awkward that you know is bad, but you're already excited about the slope of the curve or what's possible in the future, right? So, like. Like, I spent like a year getting, like 100 views a video, but, like, every week was awesome because I was like, oh, this is cool. Like, It's. It's like 10 more views than last time. Like, you know, and. And so, like, yeah, the uncomfortableness is not. It's not a sadness and it's not a pessimism. It is definitely a. It's the joy of being at the bottom of the exponential curve.

And knowing that today is day one, right. And you're uncomfortable with what is.

Exactly. Exactly. And knowing objectively that you're like, there are a lot of people that are on like linear, linear trajectories. And so you'll see as you're on this exponential trajectory that they're gaining ground on you and they're doing better. But if you actually understand that you're on an exponential trajectory, you can really, really relish the fact that although what you're doing currently is objectively worse, like you are lower on the, on the, on the Y axis, but your growth rate is compounding faster. And so you will, you will surpass them.

What have you done to help you think more exponentially when it's so not intuitive?

I mean, I think I literally took a bunch of statistics classes where I like, fit curves to exponentials. And then it just became like, kind of like all the way back to like calculus. And high school was useful in terms of just teaching me that this is like a normal phenomenon and it's just something that. It's just a. It's a, it's a mode of thinking that you should just apply to things. I'm not like some mathematical genius or anything, but I'm just like. I've taken statistics classes, I've taken math classes. And now that's just one of the tools in the tool chest that I pull out whenever I'm thinking about something. And then it's also just a mega meme now. Like, everyone thinks like, oh, we got to think of exponentials, whether they're like a VC or they're talking about COVID or they're talking about anything. Like there's. It's just like people kind of have internalized that a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it's just like learn how to fit a curve properly. I guess this is a valuable skill regardless, especially as we start to reason more about multidimensional problems. Things that can be only solved by AIs. Things that can. That can only be solved by trillion parameter models that have a trillion different directions that they can correlate off of. Using that kind of mindset is going to really, really benefit people.

What are you most excited about in the upcoming five years in terms of technology?

I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, last year, I think I was last year and the year before, like when I started the channel, I was really focused on artificial intelligence, space exploration. And then I was a little bit Interested in crypto, but more from a political perspective I would say it's such like a noisy space. But I do think that there's something, there's something important there long term. And now the space exploration theme has kind of broadened into Space exploration theme has broadened into aerospace and defense technology. That's been a really interesting place to research since obviously tensions are escalating globally. We've seen crazy stuff happen with. There's a ground war in Europe going on with Russia and Ukraine. So obviously defense technology is going to become really, really important over the next few years. And then on the artificial intelligence side things have kind of narrowed there where in previous years we were talking about flying drones and self driving cars and then there was, I did early video on GPT3 and some of the stuff that was going on there. But now it's like generative AI specifically is the trend. But I think that there's probably a lot more to it than just that. The text generation and image generation is very, very cool and that's going to continue to grow and this year's going to be amazing. But there obviously is more going on in artificial intelligence than just those two niches. And then yeah, that's, that's a lot of what's kind of kicking around in my head. There's a little bit of stuff on like the bio side but I don't have as much experience there.

How could we prepare for a future that we don't know how it exists? Like I just talking to Brian Johnson and, and he was talking about like we couldn't possibly know what a good human looks like in 2050 because we have so little knowledge of the ways in which we're gonna change. And I don't know if I necessarily agree or disagree with that perspective but it made me think like is the future that we're headed towards so unlike the one we are currently living through today that we can't even possibly begin to practice or try to practice the ways in which a good human would operate in that time. What's your perspective on that?

I don't know. I mean there's certainly uncertainty about how the future will play out. A lot of good sci fi out there about it. Obviously there's optimistic and pessimistic takes. Doesn't seem like anyone's really like acting on these yet. We're not seeing the Dune Butlerian jihad where people are trying to kill AI researchers because they're so afraid yet. But then we also, we don't really see the opposite where People are kind of just like, well, I'm not going to work at all because what's the point? AGI is right around the corner, it's going to be abundant and I won't need to work. Which is kind of like the super optimistic perspective, which is just, oh, there's just abundance and you don't have to do anything. So no one's really internalizing those, even though they're talking about them a lot on kind of like the one notch down from that, you know, it's like, yeah, independent thinking becomes very, very important because obviously artificial intelligence is very, very good at Interpolation and ChatGPT often spits out kind of like the average opinion about anything and it's very, very good at that. So that's going to be. Actually thinking independently is going to be very, very, very critical.

How do we get better at that?

I mean, I think it's like some combination of training yourself to not over consume on a media diet, like not overeating essentially when it comes to your media diet, so that you're actually forced to think things through from your own first principles or your own beliefs and then probably just a lot of practice of ca, like really, really holding yourself to account for when you were wrong. I think a lot of people don't do that. They just kind of shift from one thing to the next and they don't really notice that, okay, I was really buying this line hook, line and sinker and then it panned out completely. I mean that literally happened with like the pandemic where like in February the mainstream media was like, it's a joke, don't worry about it, it's the cold. And then for the next two years they were like, it's the worst thing ever. Like, how could you ever have doubted this? You know, so like, you know, actually, actually like keeping a scorecard for yourself probably seems important.

Do you ever, do you have any best practices you can recommend on limiting your own media consumption or limiting your own technology consumption?

I mean, I don't think there's screen time things works that well. I think the bigger thing is just actually finding interesting stuff that's better. Yes. If you don't have any interesting books on your shelf, you probably will will scroll TikTok all day, but if you have a really interesting book then you're just gonna pick that up. So actually being deliberate about curating some high quality content for yourself thoughtfully and making space for that is important. Yeah. I have this theory that millions of people are becoming illiterate, not because they can't actually read. But if you define literacy as being able to read a book on paper within the scope of one year, like 10% of our population can do that now. People just can't do it. They just can't do it. It's just impossible. They have too many distractions, too much going on, busy. It just doesn't happen. But it is very, very important. It's really, really hard. So, yeah, I mean, essentially there just seems to be big returns to the longer the form of content, the better the, the feeling. So yeah, actually sitting and reading a book that takes you 20 hours to finish is probably way better than 20 hours of mindlessly scrolling TikTok.

Yeah, I think most people would agree with that. What has been the last thing you've.

Changed your mind on recently?

Last thing I changed my mind on.

Or something you've changed your mind on? It doesn't have to be the last thing in particular.

It's a good question.

I need a minute while you think I'll. I'll tell you. Mine is about NFTs and was totally overwhelmed by the media of Twitter of the day. Really got fully immersed. This is the future. This is what's going to change everything. And, and kind of didn't have a bigger picture of like, well, yes, maybe, but like maybe over a longer time span I just went fully in it and believed it fully and then kind of looking back on it, I'm like, wow, that was kind of naive of myself.

So, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, Crypto is an easy one because yeah, the whole narrative flipped several times. That is a great interview question, but it's just really, really hard to actually think of something I guess, I mean, I guess related to AI. Like, like I think that now it is an appropriate time to start discussing AGI timelines. Whereas in the past that's been purely the providence of sci fi. So pretty useless to talk about in anything but the most abstract context. And now it feels like we actually have some sight lines and probably need to have more conversations about that. I kind of wish the Lex Friedman podcast was going in reverse right now because he used to be the artificial intelligence podcast and that was like the main focus of his channel, of his content and now he does a lot of different stuff. But we need, we need someone like that to just facilitate long form conversations purely with AI researchers about, just about AI and the future of AI. I think that would be very, very, very, very valuable content right now. And like salons. I'm not talking about like you know, the mainstream media debating it on like Fox News and msnbc. I don't think that's going to be productive. I actually think, like, if we can stay away from that, it'll probably be better. But I mean, these things are already happening. People are already talking about this stuff.

Much more significantly, are there any particular researchers or people you think would be effective to talk to, particularly around this subject? Because it's one that I'm fascinated by, but I don't know too much about and I don't know the people to talk to even.

Yeah, I mean, there's a good, there's some good diagrams on Twitter for like that map all of the different AI folks based on. Are they optimistic or pessimistic? And do they think AGI will happen soon or later? Sooner or later. And so it's like Sam Altman is in like AGI pretty soon, but also pretty optimistic. There's this guy Gwern, who's this anonymous researcher. He's extremely pessimistic and thinks AGI is going to happen very, very soon. Then there's other people who think AGI is going to happen. It'll take decades, but it'll be bad when it happens. And there's other people who think, oh, it'll be good, but it'll take a long time. I can send you the link to that. It's pretty interesting if I can find it.

Yeah, I definitely will check that out. Going back into your YouTube and your goals for 2023, how has your YouTube channel helped Lucy at all your company?

Yeah, I mean, mostly it's helped with hiring. It's just a great, you know, obviously you're putting content out to a lot of people. It's very easy to pull from that audience to hire people if you need to hire someone. And then I think on a bigger scale, it's just help with storytelling and in pretty much any business interaction, it helps to be able to think through the story that you're telling. If you're trying to sell something, you're telling a story like you're selling Nikes. You're telling a story about someone who is not good at running and then they buy this product and then they're transformed and then they become a good runner and they become healthy. Plot is what happens in a movie. It's like the action steps. Story is the transformation of a character. So who will be transformed? So everything from you're pitching an investor. How will their career be transformed by investing in your company? Well, they'll see financial returns, they'll become popular. They'll be recognized as a luminary, as a genius for investing in your, your product. How are you going to execute the business plan? Well, there's a story there how we're an underdog now, but we will be transformed into an industry titan and a hugely successful company. Who are we up against? Who are the villains of the story? In our case, it's big Tobacco. It's a very easy villain. It's a great villain, almost too good in some ways. But yeah, you get the idea. In any context, being able to think about storytelling is I think, always useful.

How do you get better at storytelling other than just creating a lot of videos?

I mean you can study stories. I don't think you can just sit on the couch, watch 25 movies and then make a great movie. You gotta practice making the stories. But yeah, I mean it's probably, it's probably like spend 80 or 80% of your time creating and trying to do the thing. This is for learning any new skill. And then 10% of the time consuming great works in that medium and Then the other 10% analysis of how it works. So let's say you're learning to code, probably spent 80% of your time coding, 10% of your time reading great code, like looking at Python, the Linux kernel, like these great projects like how do they get built? And then the other 10%, like watching tutorials like learning like testing out things like reading books on the subject, looking at different examples of practically telling you how to do something. But it's always like 80% of your time is like doing the thing.

Yeah, checks out.

From my perspective you would probably advise someone to do the exact same thing on podcasting, right?

Yes.

Like do not spend 100 hours listening to a how to podcast show or taking a course. Actually go and get the reps in and then, and then sprinkle in some expertise and sprinkle in some listening to, you know, the daily and serial and Joe Rogan to see who the best podcasters in the world are. And then you can level up slowly.

Well, it means so much more when you are doing the thing and then also watching the greats do the thing. Exactly like that. Just so much more helpful than just watching non stop. Yeah, I'm, I'm curious from, from your perspective, what is the modern day version of the cigarette? A lot of people will say it's social media. If you talk to a lot of people who. But what do you think in 50 years we'll look at and the thing that we're doing today is so ridiculous or so socially accepted, but in 50 years, it will not be.

I mean, sadly, it's like it's still smoking. We have people still smoke a ton of cigarettes. And like, the government is not banning them. Like, they're banning the vapes and they're banning all sorts of stuff. But, like, cigarettes are marching on just fine. Like, those company stocks are doing great. They're the best performing of last year. They're dividending out billions of dollars. It's a booming industry. Big tobacco is doing great. So ironically, the cigarette of today is the cigarette of tomorrow, sadly. But I mean, other stuff. I really, I don't know. There's a lot of small things. I mean, I think the harder core stimulants are probably one of the crazier things. The, the Adderalls and Modafinils. I think that people are really, really miscalculating the negative effects of the heavy use. There's just so many people that are on this stuff daily. And I just have a huge problem with it. I'm not a doctor. Don't take. This is not medical advice. But you go to a psychiatrist and say, one of the characteristics of having child ADD is losing things. Like, show me a kid that doesn't lose something. You got a serial killer on your hands. I lost a sweatshirt. Every day I went to camp, I would take a sweatshirt. Cause it was cold. In the morning, it would get hot. I'd take off the sweatshirt, I'd run around, I'd lose things. Did I have some sort of crippling ADD that needed hardcore medication to solve? No, that's ridiculous. Yeah, I bet if you took a bunch of ADD meds, I probably would have remembered my sweatshirt. But I would have been, like, destroyed like, half my brain, right? And so now people are, like, going way too deep into this stuff. Like, there's definitely, like, a responsible way to use it, but, like, the default prescription is just take it every single day. And that's just insane. Like, even if you go back to, like, World War II and they were giving, like, soldiers, like, amphetamines, like, they weren't just saying, like, take the amphetamines every single day. They were saying, like, take the amphetamines before you go charge into the enemy's, like, foxhole and like, do the final battle, right? And yet, like, the shrink will just say, like, oh, yeah, take like this. Take this ADD meds every single day. Like, even on Sunday. On Sunday, when you can just be chilling on the couch, like, watching a show or something, like, even on vacation. And they're like, yeah, take it every day. Like, you have this disease. Like, you need this thing. It's ridiculous. So I think, like, people are starting to push it too far. We're seeing a lot of, like. Like, you know, psychosis that's induced from these medications where, like, people are, like, straight up ending up in mental hospitals and, like, losing it because they're pushing it too far. And I'm very, very worried. I think we might see something like, you know, what happened with, like, the, like, the sacklers and the opioid epidemic. Like, it's starting to feel like there's going to be, like, a bombshell journalistic, like, investigative journalism piece and then a court case and then a Netflix documentary. And then, like, we're gonna realize that it was like, oh, like, they were, like, you know, really screwing up, like, millions of people. So that'd probably be my answer.

How has becoming a parent changed your perspective on life?

It's a good question. I mean, I think it's crystallized a few things. I mean, it's. It's just cool to see, like, how much you can love a baby. Like, that's kind of hilarious because, like, before you have a kid, you don't really just love babies, and then after you do, you just, like, have this amazing love for this baby, and it's just hilarious. And. Yeah, I mean, it does all the default things that you hear, like, oh, you know about priorities, and you realize that, like, going out drinking isn't important, and, like, what's really important is your family. And, like, that's all true, but I was kind of expecting that, so I had kind of, like, priced that in essentially. Like, I kind of. Like, I kind of knew that, oh, like, I'm going to really enjoy this. Like, I've talked to enough people. I understand that this is how this works. So that wasn't like, a shock or anything. I think it definitely makes it clearer that, like, you're like, as a dad, like, I'm a man. Like, I'm responsible for things. Like, I can't. I have a lot of responsibilities that I take very seriously. And, you know, it's good. It's important. It's like, it's a good. It's definitely good for just overall, like, life satisfaction and happiness. I was listening to something about. Men who commit suicide are often highly likely to cite that they don't feel needed or they don't feel like they have a purpose. And I'm like, God damn. I feel like I have 12 purposes. I feel like I have so many things that I have to do. I have tons of responsibilities and like, it's stressful in some ways, but really it's like a good type of stress where it's like, okay, like every minute of every day I'm feeling like productive. I'm feeling like I'm doing good for the world and for my family and I'm very motivated. Like, it's very good in that sense. But yeah, to take it back to Paul Graham, he just, did you see his tweet about this? This is a little contemporaneous, but he was just pointing out that, like, you know, people often say that having kids isn't a drag on productivity because it helps, like, clarify what's important and you wind up focusing on like the most important things in your life. And he was like, but that can't be true because if that was true, then people would be having kids just for the productivity boost. It's like, okay, that's kind of a good, that's kind of a good argument. But yeah, I mean, it doesn't really matter. In my mind. It's like, I'm going to have kids. That's like an important, important part of my life. Like, that's, I'm not just some robot, like automaton. Like, I need to maximize the amount of paperclips I make or whatever. Like, I'm on the journey of life more than anything. So, yes, like, if, if I wind up making 10% less money because I had a kid, like, that's a great trade. Like, I also live in California. It's the same thing where it's like, I could make, I could pay way more, way less in taxes if I didn't live here. But I like California, so I paid the taxes. It's like, yeah, may, maybe, maybe parenting is like a tax on your productivity, but it's like it's the greatest trade ever, so it doesn't matter.

That's a clip for sure. I, I, that's great. I love that random parenting. I'm curious, I'm curious how you're doing on your 2023 goals. You said your three goals. Make more in depth YouTube videos about important tech companies, continue to dig into geopolitics and American defense technology. And three, learn about venture capital from the best in the business. I assume this is all professional related goals.

Yeah.

Not like life related. But how are you doing on those three?

I'm doing okay. It's a little bit early to tell for a few Reasons. So, basically to give the listeners some perspective, starting in January 2nd, I joined founders Fund, the venture capital firm in San Francisco, as an entrepreneur in residence. So my role there is. I'm continuing to make YouTube videos, but I'm talking about a lot of things that are interesting to the firm. It was a great partnership because I was already doing that and they were excited to support and it's just been a really, really awesome partnership. I'm super, super happy about it. Um, so I'm going to be. I was already making a ton of videos about Founders Fund companies. I'm going to make a lot more companies that I'm interested in. There's zero. They're not twisting my arm to talk about companies that I'm not interested in. It's just go off and, and we'll, we'll give you resources and let you talk to folks internally. Now on the actual. So of those three things, like, I do feel like the quality is increasing. I just hired a new editor and he's getting up to speed. So the content is getting better, but it's slow because he's new and I'm training him. But I can see the trajectory again. Uncomfortable. I can tell that he's making. The mistakes that he's making are not bad. Aesthetically, they're bad for the YouTube algorithm, which is the hardest thing because I have to be like, dude, I love what you did. This is amazing. This is cinematic. This would do really well on Netflix. But we're on YouTube, so that three second intro needs to be half a second. Retention. Yeah, retention, retention. And it's just brutal. And it's like, look, I prefer your version, but we gotta do it the cheap way. So finding a balance there is definitely a progress. And then learning about geopolitics and defense technology, that's definitely happening. But I mean, geopolitics is a massive, massive, massive thing. It's all just in service of me becoming the World War II dad. Like, that's clearly like where this is all going. I can kind of tell. But it's been fun. I'm definitely getting sharper on China, Taiwan and the US and like the semiconductor industry. Just reading a lot, talking to a lot of people and trying to understand just the shape of the American defense technology industry and how that will evolve. There's a lot of. It's becoming very trendy and very hot and it'll be interesting to see how that kind of evolves over the next couple months. But still pretty early there, starting to get into it. I've Done deep dives on Google's role with the military, Apple's supply chain in China. These are videos that will come out in a few weeks. And then talking about Microsoft's involvement with the military. So I'm kind of setting the stage of understanding who are the key players, what has been done in the past, looking at some of the history of DARPA and the history of these big defense primes and kind of understanding the structure of the industry and then going deeper into the actual startups. So still very early there. And then on the third one, also very early because venture capital has been very slow recently. So there isn't that much to learn right now because there aren't many deals happening, happening. But it's great talking to everyone at the firm and getting to know how they think about things and just going through what their experience has been like over the last few years. That's been beneficial, but not many moments of like, okay, there's something critical happening and I'm there. A fly on the wall learning, that's kind of the goal. But it hasn't really happened yet because there aren't that many exciting things happening in the world of venture capital yet. It's still, yeah, it's early. We are definitely on the, on the early side of the, of the exponential curve for all three of those.

Well, I'm so excited to track the progress throughout 2023 and beyond, and I'm so grateful for you joining me here today. I like to end these podcasts with.

A challenge or asking the guests for.

A challenge, because a challenge points to the place in your heart you think people should take this conversation and actually do some action in their real life? Is there anything comes to mind for a challenge to leave people with as they go about and do the next thing in their day?

I mean, how big is the challenge? Like, we could talk about, like, hey, record a five minute video of yourself and post it online. Like, probably be a really good experience for most people to do for.

For some people that's a massive challenge. For some people, that's not big enough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I don't know, maybe a good thing would be just to answer that question. I got really hung up on the question of what have you changed your mind about most recently? And I don't think it's because I haven't changed my mind recently. I think it's because I'm kind of constantly changing my mind and it happens more frequently than I think. So I don't really track it But I think going back and creating a little bit of a scorecard for yourself, I mean, that question is going to be something that I kind of think about maybe for the rest of the day. I don't know if I'll have a good answer ever. But yeah, I think everyone should. All the listeners should try and think back to not necessarily something they changed their mind on, but something that they like, where they believed a narrative and they fell into a trap. That's more of it. Because it's one thing to change your mind when you're just like, oh, I didn't know that much and then I learned a little bit more and then I understood the topic. I didn't change my mind on exponential curves when I took calculus. I just developed that for the first time. But I think that going back through the news and kind of understanding the history and kind of understanding when you fell into a specific pattern of thinking and revising that that might be a useful experience.

Well, I think Twitter is an incredible resource if you're a public tweeter, to, to look at and review, because you can look at a tweet and see what mind state you were in when you were sending certain things. So I recommend going back if you are a tweeter. If you're not a tweeter, check your journal entries and your text messages. Those are good ways to find your own frames of thinking so you can put yourself back in that mind state. And I'm really grateful you said that, that it's going to stay with you that question. Because my aim for these podcasts is to help somebody learn something new about themselves. And if you can take that question and hopefully think about it for the rest of the day, you might learn something new about yourself which will help you in some way. And people can listen and think about that as well. So thank you so much, John, for your time. Where should we send people to connect with you further?

So I'm on YouTube at John Coogan, just my full name. And then I'm also on Twitter on Coogan, my full name again. And might, might have a podcast feed soon, but still working on that.

Amazing. And please check out the YouTube channel. It is one of the most highly produced, incredible looks into technology that I've seen. Probably the best YouTube technology channel in the world. Check that out. Linked below, one of my favorites. And thank you so much, John, for your time.

Thanks a lot.