The Exchanges

Q Speaking of the different processes, yours that you've mastered, I think, is writing. I love that so many of the things you've written. When we think about some of them, there's one in particular. When we think about the world of social, I want to start on what is the graph design problem with so many social apps today, Eugene?

A So that's a piece I just wrote, and it's something I, you know, have only noticed in hindsight in using a lot of social apps, both apps that are mature, but also apps that Are new. So in technology, we like to talk about technical debt, you know, firms that build up a lot of technical debt, and they need to set aside time and projects to retire that. I think in social, we have something that I think of as social graph debt. In particular, if you look at a Western social media, a lot of it ties like a content feed to your follow graph. So you follow people, those people publish photos, write little tweets, whatever it is. And then you get those into your feed. What that architecture means is that if you follow the wrong people, your user experience can be bad because you'll get irrelevant content in the feed. You know, I'll bring path dependence back here. You know, social networks are like complex adaptive systems. They're these dynamic networks, but that also means that they're heavily, heavily path dependent. If you think about Facebook encouraging people to follow everyone under the sun, That had huge downstream consequences for them in the, you know, types of context collapse that they're still struggling to deal with, with newsfeed. If you think about Twitter and its decision to, you know, not just show you tweets from people you follow, but also tweets from those people f…

AI assessment note: “in social, we have something that I think of as social graph debt.”

Q So you've read your fair share, Eugene. What's the favorite book and why?

A I break into fiction and nonfiction, two different mediums. So in fiction, I really love Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Just because it's a book I just keep rereading and wrestling with. I think that stream of consciousness, like as a technique for writing, has always intrigued me. It's like writing on expert mode. I'm always interested in, you know, writing that tries to simulate how we as humans experience the world memory, you know, sort of this like weird nonlinear way that our minds wander. And then in terms of nonfiction, and related to my early discussion of charts and graphs, Tufti's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I feel like I recommend it to a lot of people who never crack open the book because they think it's a boring reference. It's actually just so easily readable. It's so readable. It's so gorgeously laid out, and it changed my mind on so many things, not just statistical graphics. I think at a philosophical level, it's really just about elegance of communication, which I think is useful no matter what medium you work in.

AI assessment note: “So in fiction, I really love Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.”

Q I love it, and I would love to read that. But I want to start today with something that we're actually both very passionate about, which is kind of decision-making itself and information ingestion. Obviously, as an investor, I think a lot about my own decision-making processes to think about decision-making and information ingestions. Why does the process and medium by which you make decisions matter?

A Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, really in hindsight over the years, thinking about all the biggest decisions I've had to make, or that companies I've been at have had to make. I've come to think that the process or medium you choose to make a decision actually can affect what decision you make, and so it's really important, in my opinion, to choose the right process and medium for For the decision. And different processes lead to different optimal outcomes, depending on what type of decision you make. So just to give an example, I'm going to list a few mediums that I've used in the past to make decisions that I've seen other people use. One is writing. Canonical example that everybody in tech loves to use is Amazon with its six-page memos. There's Socratic debate. Think about oral culture, arguing in meetings. I got that from Gustav Saderstrom, who runs product at Spotify, you know, he talked about, hey, the importance of Socratic debate. Think about Socratic debate. It has thousands of years of history behind it. It's actually a very specific method that they use to teach in business schools and things like that, and when people talk about Amazon's six-page memo culture, I think they always tend to leave out the part where after you read someone's memo and you mark it up, you have a long in-person oral debate over that, and so that's another method. Prototypes is another …

AI assessment note: “process or medium you choose to make a decision actually can affect what decision you make”

Q The process to that decision, it requires information, whether that is, as we said, you know, a Socratic, or whether it's writing, or whatever that different process is. And when we chatted before, you said how information is received is path dependent. And honestly, I had no idea what that meant, Eugene. So help me understand, what does it mean, information is received is path dependent?

A Well, there's one method of thought which just says you can separate the, like, content of information Information from the form of it, and that those are two independent things. You know, I learned a lot of this early in my career at Amazon, just studying Jeff Bezos. You know, he would spend all this time crafting the strategy for the company with all his directs and, you know, with the strat planning department, which I was in at the time. And so I would get to see these messages evolve. And what he started to realize over time was sometimes he would deliver a strategy message for the company, like this is our mission for the year or whatnot. And then, you know, Just like a week later, you know, people would forget what that message was, and so Jeff realized, hey, I actually have to encode my messages and deliver them in a way which makes them memorable, and so I saw him evolve his way of communicating to the company in order to sort of really, like, harden his messages, to make them almost viral, to make them stick in people's heads, and I also like to watch old Steve Jobs keynotes as well, because I think he understood that, Hey, we can launch our products any number of ways, but these huge keynotes are probably the best way to embed our products in the culture, and we need to spend a lot of time crafting our keynotes to be pitch perfect. You know, there's a reason Steve Jo…

AI assessment note: “you can separate the, like, content of information Information from the form of it”

Q I mean, with the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of thought, when you look back now at the social incumbents that we have, what do you think are the best and the worst design decisions that have been made over the last decade or so?

A Well, the single most momentous decision, you could say it's probably both the best and worst decision, and it's very striking now to think about it, is this idea of the singular Feed. This, like, singular, semi-public feed. I don't know if you're old, you might be too young, Harry, but I'm old enough to remember Facebook before the news feed. You used to follow or friend people and then have to go to each person's profile to actually, you know, write on their wall and see what was going on there. It's crazy now to think about that era of social, but that's how MySpace worked. There was no feed. You just go to visit the profile pages of friends you had.

AI assessment note: “single most momentous decision... is this idea of the singular Feed.”

Q It started, honestly, easy to scale podcasts to the scale we are. Now, hard, hard. Hard, hard. Tell me, why do you believe entertainment has now become zero sum?

A You know, I'm old enough to remember when all of the different forms of media in my life were spatially separated from each other. What I mean by that was, when I was a kid in high school, I would watch television in our family room, because that's where our TV was. I would watch movies at the movie theater. That's where you went to watch movies. I would listen to music in the car, because that's where the, uh, Cassette tape player and the radio were. And I would play video games in my bedroom because that's where my computer was. That meant that each of those industries, they kind of regarded their competitors as other companies in their same industry. As you know, the ever connected smartphone in the internet has changed that dynamic completely. Now, every time I unlock my phone, I have every one of those things that I just talked about on my phone at my disposal. So I actually get the choice of what I want to do at that moment. And it's the same thing that happened in newspapers. So newspapers used to come, get delivered to your doorstep, and they had the front page, the business section, the auto section, the sports page. They kind of determine what your allocation of each type of content was, but we're in the age of infinite content and infinite user choice, and when that happens, the market share of each of these industries is suddenly up for grabs. If you love video game…

AI assessment note: “puts all these industries into competition with each other in the attention economy”

Q I know I have to say, I feel like Benjamin Button. I'm quite young, but I've been doing this a while, but I want to start today with a little bit of context. So tell me, you know, we have this incredible writing, this incredible thought leadership. But how did you make your way into the world of tech? And tell me a little bit about Eugene's entry point.

A You know, when I graduated undergrad in 95, that was a long time ago, I thought I was going to go to law school, but my heart wasn't really in it. I broke my leg right before graduation. I spent the summer really just with my leg propped up. And so at the end of the summer, I deferred law school for a year and I said, I need to go do something else. I need to pay off my school loans. I need to think about what I want to do next. But you know, the web was just getting big. And so after a year of just doing some consulting and waiting on maybe going to grad school, I realized, you know, the internet really is something that probably will change the world in a huge way, and I just need to be in that space. I don't want to go back to school. My passion really was just surfing around the internet and seeing all the crazy things that were being built. This was the era of Mary Meeker's internet report, which would get published every year. I remember flipping through and being so excited with everything, and so I just started applying to all the big hot tech companies at the time. I didn't really have any specific qualifications for a lot of the jobs listed, but Amazon was definitely one that was on my list. I was buying a lot of books from them, and I remember they had a job listing for VP of Business Development. It required 10 years of experience, and I was like, you know, I don't …

AI assessment note: “I just started applying to all the big hot tech companies at the time.”

Q Speaking of the different processes, yours that you've mastered, I think, is writing. I love that so many of the things you've written. When we think about some of them, there's one in particular. When we think about the world of social, I want to start on what is the graph design problem with so many social apps today, Eugene?

A So that's a piece I just wrote, and it's something I, you know, have only noticed in hindsight in using a lot of social apps, both apps that are mature, but also apps that Are new. So in technology, we like to talk about technical debt, you know, firms that build up a lot of technical debt, and they need to set aside time and projects to retire that. I think in social, we have something that I think of as social graph debt. In particular, if you look at a Western social media, a lot of it ties like a content feed to your follow graph. So you follow people, those people publish photos, write little tweets, whatever it is. And then you get those into your feed. What that architecture means is that if you follow the wrong people, your user experience can be bad because you'll get irrelevant content in the feed. You know, I'll bring path dependence back here. You know, social networks are like complex adaptive systems. They're these dynamic networks, but that also means that they're heavily, heavily path dependent. If you think about Facebook encouraging people to follow everyone under the sun, That had huge downstream consequences for them in the, you know, types of context collapse that they're still struggling to deal with, with newsfeed. If you think about Twitter and its decision to, you know, not just show you tweets from people you follow, but also tweets from those people f…

AI assessment note: “I think in social, we have something that I think of as social graph debt.”

Q I know I have to say, I feel like Benjamin Button. I'm quite young, but I've been doing this a while, but I want to start today with a little bit of context. So tell me, you know, we have this incredible writing, this incredible thought leadership. But how did you make your way into the world of tech? And tell me a little bit about Eugene's entry point.

A You know, when I graduated undergrad in 95, that was a long time ago, I thought I was going to go to law school, but my heart wasn't really in it. I broke my leg right before graduation. I spent the summer really just with my leg propped up. And so at the end of the summer, I deferred law school for a year and I said, I need to go do something else. I need to pay off my school loans. I need to think about what I want to do next. But you know, the web was just getting big. And so after a year of just doing some consulting and waiting on maybe going to grad school, I realized, you know, the internet really is something that probably will change the world in a huge way, and I just need to be in that space. I don't want to go back to school. My passion really was just surfing around the internet and seeing all the crazy things that were being built. This was the era of Mary Meeker's internet report, which would get published every year. I remember flipping through and being so excited with everything, and so I just started applying to all the big hot tech companies at the time. I didn't really have any specific qualifications for a lot of the jobs listed, but Amazon was definitely one that was on my list. I was buying a lot of books from them, and I remember they had a job listing for VP of Business Development. It required 10 years of experience, and I was like, you know, I don't …

AI assessment note: “I just started applying to all the big hot tech companies at the time.”

Q I mean, with the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of thought, when you look back now at the social incumbents that we have, what do you think are the best and the worst design decisions that have been made over the last decade or so?

A Well, the single most momentous decision, you could say it's probably both the best and worst decision, and it's very striking now to think about it, is this idea of the singular Feed. This, like, singular, semi-public feed. I don't know if you're old, you might be too young, Harry, but I'm old enough to remember Facebook before the news feed. You used to follow or friend people and then have to go to each person's profile to actually, you know, write on their wall and see what was going on there. It's crazy now to think about that era of social, but that's how MySpace worked. There was no feed. You just go to visit the profile pages of friends you had.

AI assessment note: “the single most momentous decision, you could say it's probably both the best and worst decision”

Q If there's one thing I've learned through fundraising, it's the art of storytelling, my friend. Tell me, what piece of advice do you often give but find hard to follow yourself?

A The biggest thing I say is I tell people to follow the little voice in their head. I think that's just the term we give for intuition, and some of my best decisions have been based on acting in my intuition, but I I have that habit, which a lot of product people have of when it comes to making decisions, you know, you make the list of pros and cons. You try to come up with some very rational framework. Maybe you write a memo or whatever it is. And I think that is because we have this bias towards intuition as being uninformed by data. But I think that in fact, our intuitions are informed by massive streams of data accumulated over many years of living in the world. We just don't have a way to describe what that is. And so often, you know, when I tell people, hey, like, they're like, this is a very tough decision. Do I take this job or not? Do I move here or not? I will say, what is the little voice in your head to tell you, you know, don't try to explain to me rationally why you're making this decision. Don't show me your pros and cons lists. I feel like a lot of people who do that are very happy with their decision afterwards. And so I think that's a big thing is that we need to put more faith in our intuition.

AI assessment note: “The biggest thing I say is I tell people to follow the little voice”

Q I love it, and I would love to read that. But I want to start today with something that we're actually both very passionate about, which is kind of decision-making itself and information ingestion. Obviously, as an investor, I think a lot about my own decision-making processes to think about decision-making and information ingestions. Why does the process and medium by which you make decisions matter?

A Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, really in hindsight over the years, thinking about all the biggest decisions I've had to make, or that companies I've been at have had to make. I've come to think that the process or medium you choose to make a decision actually can affect what decision you make, and so it's really important, in my opinion, to choose the right process and medium for For the decision. And different processes lead to different optimal outcomes, depending on what type of decision you make. So just to give an example, I'm going to list a few mediums that I've used in the past to make decisions that I've seen other people use. One is writing. Canonical example that everybody in tech loves to use is Amazon with its six-page memos. There's Socratic debate. Think about oral culture, arguing in meetings. I got that from Gustav Saderstrom, who runs product at Spotify, you know, he talked about, hey, the importance of Socratic debate. Think about Socratic debate. It has thousands of years of history behind it. It's actually a very specific method that they use to teach in business schools and things like that, and when people talk about Amazon's six-page memo culture, I think they always tend to leave out the part where after you read someone's memo and you mark it up, you have a long in-person oral debate over that, and so that's another method. Prototypes is another …

AI assessment note: “the process or medium you choose to make a decision actually can affect what decision you make”

Q It started, honestly, easy to scale podcasts to the scale we are. Now, hard, hard. Hard, hard. Tell me, why do you believe entertainment has now become zero sum?

A You know, I'm old enough to remember when all of the different forms of media in my life were spatially separated from each other. What I mean by that was, when I was a kid in high school, I would watch television in our family room, because that's where our TV was. I would watch movies at the movie theater. That's where you went to watch movies. I would listen to music in the car, because that's where the, uh, Cassette tape player and the radio were. And I would play video games in my bedroom because that's where my computer was. That meant that each of those industries, they kind of regarded their competitors as other companies in their same industry. As you know, the ever connected smartphone in the internet has changed that dynamic completely. Now, every time I unlock my phone, I have every one of those things that I just talked about on my phone at my disposal. So I actually get the choice of what I want to do at that moment. And it's the same thing that happened in newspapers. So newspapers used to come, get delivered to your doorstep, and they had the front page, the business section, the auto section, the sports page. They kind of determine what your allocation of each type of content was, but we're in the age of infinite content and infinite user choice, and when that happens, the market share of each of these industries is suddenly up for grabs. If you love video game…

AI assessment note: “puts all these industries into competition with each other in the attention economy.”

Q The process to that decision, it requires information, whether that is, as we said, you know, a Socratic, or whether it's writing, or whatever that different process is. And when we chatted before, you said how information is received is path dependent. And honestly, I had no idea what that meant, Eugene. So help me understand, what does it mean, information is received is path dependent?

A Well, there's one method of thought which just says you can separate the, like, content of information Information from the form of it, and that those are two independent things. You know, I learned a lot of this early in my career at Amazon, just studying Jeff Bezos. You know, he would spend all this time crafting the strategy for the company with all his directs and, you know, with the strat planning department, which I was in at the time. And so I would get to see these messages evolve. And what he started to realize over time was sometimes he would deliver a strategy message for the company, like this is our mission for the year or whatnot. And then, you know, Just like a week later, you know, people would forget what that message was, and so Jeff realized, hey, I actually have to encode my messages and deliver them in a way which makes them memorable, and so I saw him evolve his way of communicating to the company in order to sort of really, like, harden his messages, to make them almost viral, to make them stick in people's heads, and I also like to watch old Steve Jobs keynotes as well, because I think he understood that, Hey, we can launch our products any number of ways, but these huge keynotes are probably the best way to embed our products in the culture, and we need to spend a lot of time crafting our keynotes to be pitch perfect. You know, there's a reason Steve Jo…

AI assessment note: “separate the, like, content of information Information from the form of it”

Q Should you be dependent on the type of person that you are, or on the type of decision that's made? So for example, I suck at writing, but hopefully I'm not too bad at speaking. Or should it be, no, this is an investment versus this is a different type of decision? Should it be taken into the person profile or the decision profile?

A Well, there's no doubt that People have different preferences, but I think if you were to run a company, you would want to choose the right process for the right type of decision. So let's just take charts and graphs as an example. So one of the most famous examples, the importance of visualization of data was the Challenger shuttle disaster. Some people were against the launch and their argument was that, hey, we've had some failures in the past. And they scribbled a little table of data with past launch failures at different temperatures, but the way it's presented and you can Google this and find this actual scribble table with some notes on the side. If you just looked at the table, you would say, okay, it seems like our launch failures are really just random. They're not really correlated with temperature. And what many famous data visualization people have noted afterwards was if you included all the data points from launches, including the ones that were successful, And if you presented it as a chart with temperature on one axis and launch failures on the other, you would see that every successful shuttle launch had been above some temperature and every launch below that temperature had been a failure in the past. Whereas if you just looked at the failures, you would see, oh, it looks like random. It has nothing to do with temperature. People use that example all the tim…

AI assessment note: “you would want to choose the right process for the right type of decision.”

Q Can I ask, you know, this was such a seminal piece, and actually Parker Conrad at Rippling messaged me last night saying, hey, I loved it. It was so fun. Transformational to how I think about social networks. You have to ask him, what was the response? Did it lead to job offers? Did it lead to consulting? For you personally, what was the response?

A Yeah, I think similar to what you were saying about, you know, your brand leading to deal flow and things, there's some equivalent, right? If you write a piece that goes viral online, you will have people from different companies ask to grab coffee with you. You will get different offers, job offers, because, you know, that piece then attaches to To your personal brand. For a lot of people, I felt like, to me in hindsight, it's not like I'm the first person to ever write about status in history. There have been a lot of sociologists who have studied the topic and studied social capital. I find social capital very compelling to study because I don't think we study social capital with as much rigor as maybe financial capital, but in many ways, it's just as predictable a medium. I think maybe I was just one of the first to link my Social capital theory to tech products. So it's fun. I think the biggest thing that I enjoy coming out of writing pieces is that I get to meet a lot of people from all over the world who write me, you know, especially from other countries. So some random person translated my piece into Chinese, and it went viral in China. So I got invites to go to China and speak at various companies. I got a lot of outreach from entrepreneurs in India. And it's always fascinating to me to hear about how Status Dynamics Are localized to different markets. On the one hand…

AI assessment note: “You will get different offers, job offers, because, you know, that piece then attaches”

Q you worry about the paradox of choice? As you said, you were kind of siloed in your decision making around the activity of choice that you chose. You're in the drawing room, Or the living room, you watch the TV, the bedroom, PC game. Now we're filled with this paradox of choice of like, what do we choose when we can have it all? How do you think about that?

A Essentially, you can consider the pool of media in the world to be infinite or content. And if you essentially just say, okay, let's just pull the slider bar to infinity. We know microeconomics and in a lot of areas that when you actually change one of the variables to infinity, often it's not just like a linear change. In the effect of it, it changes it into something entirely different. I think we're still early in figuring out how do we deal with the paradox of choice. If you just think about Netflix's homepage and how much time they've spent on trying to figure out, like, what do we show you to get you to keep watching and subscribing? Everybody is still grappling with how do I get that person's attention? And the hard part is that because all forms of media compete with each other, you actually have to study the meta on capturing people's attention across industries. You know, how do games do it? How do podcasts do it? How do books still capture attention? You're going to start to see, I think, a lot of industries borrowing from other industries tactics to grab a user's attention.

AI assessment note: “I think we're still early in figuring out how do we deal with the paradox”

Q What do you think is your biggest strength, and what's your biggest weakness?

A Again, to our earlier point, I would say they're interrelated. So I tend to have what I think of as a slow heartbeat. You know, I tend to be pretty calm under situations of stress, and I've Pride myself on that somewhat because I think when we're very emotional, we don't make the best decisions, and so under stress, I am like, alright, like, how do I remove myself from the emotional stream and just think logically? On the flip side, as a product person, I think, I know that, like, a lot of why people use certain products is about how those products and services make them feel, and something that I think I need to improve a lot on, you know, how do I appeal to people's emotions more directly, whether it's, you know, as a product leader or a An executive or even just like a friend. Sometimes, you know, people don't want the calm presence. They want the motivational speaker or the person that hypes them up. A big way that I've tried to frame that to myself is that you can use charisma as like a multiplier for your ideas. And so sometimes you have to know when to like appeal to the emotions and not just the so rational.

AI assessment note: “I tend to be pretty calm under situations of stress”

Q Should you be dependent on the type of person that you are, or on the type of decision that's made? So for example, I suck at writing, but hopefully I'm not too bad at speaking. Or should it be, no, this is an investment versus this is a different type of decision? Should it be taken into the person profile or the decision profile?

A Well, there's no doubt that People have different preferences, but I think if you were to run a company, you would want to choose the right process for the right type of decision. So let's just take charts and graphs as an example. So one of the most famous examples, the importance of visualization of data was the Challenger shuttle disaster. Some people were against the launch and their argument was that, hey, we've had some failures in the past. And they scribbled a little table of data with past launch failures at different temperatures, but the way it's presented and you can Google this and find this actual scribble table with some notes on the side. If you just looked at the table, you would say, okay, it seems like our launch failures are really just random. They're not really correlated with temperature. And what many famous data visualization people have noted afterwards was if you included all the data points from launches, including the ones that were successful, And if you presented it as a chart with temperature on one axis and launch failures on the other, you would see that every successful shuttle launch had been above some temperature and every launch below that temperature had been a failure in the past. Whereas if you just looked at the failures, you would see, oh, it looks like random. It has nothing to do with temperature. People use that example all the tim…

AI assessment note: “you would want to choose the right process for the right type of decision.”

Q you worry about the paradox of choice? As you said, you were kind of siloed in your decision making around the activity of choice that you chose. You're in the drawing room, Or the living room, you watch the TV, the bedroom, PC game. Now we're filled with this paradox of choice of like, what do we choose when we can have it all? How do you think about that?

A Essentially, you can consider the pool of media in the world to be infinite or content. And if you essentially just say, okay, let's just pull the slider bar to infinity. We know microeconomics and in a lot of areas that when you actually change one of the variables to infinity, often it's not just like a linear change. In the effect of it, it changes it into something entirely different. I think we're still early in figuring out how do we deal with the paradox of choice. If you just think about Netflix's homepage and how much time they've spent on trying to figure out, like, what do we show you to get you to keep watching and subscribing? Everybody is still grappling with how do I get that person's attention? And the hard part is that because all forms of media compete with each other, you actually have to study the meta on capturing people's attention across industries. You know, how do games do it? How do podcasts do it? How do books still capture attention? You're going to start to see, I think, a lot of industries borrowing from other industries tactics to grab a user's attention.

AI assessment note: “I think we're still early in figuring out how do we deal with the paradox”

Q Can I ask, you know, this was such a seminal piece, and actually Parker Conrad at Rippling messaged me last night saying, hey, I loved it. It was so fun. Transformational to how I think about social networks. You have to ask him, what was the response? Did it lead to job offers? Did it lead to consulting? For you personally, what was the response?

A Yeah, I think similar to what you were saying about, you know, your brand leading to deal flow and things, there's some equivalent, right? If you write a piece that goes viral online, you will have people from different companies ask to grab coffee with you. You will get different offers, job offers, because, you know, that piece then attaches to To your personal brand. For a lot of people, I felt like, to me in hindsight, it's not like I'm the first person to ever write about status in history. There have been a lot of sociologists who have studied the topic and studied social capital. I find social capital very compelling to study because I don't think we study social capital with as much rigor as maybe financial capital, but in many ways, it's just as predictable a medium. I think maybe I was just one of the first to link my Social capital theory to tech products. So it's fun. I think the biggest thing that I enjoy coming out of writing pieces is that I get to meet a lot of people from all over the world who write me, you know, especially from other countries. So some random person translated my piece into Chinese, and it went viral in China. So I got invites to go to China and speak at various companies. I got a lot of outreach from entrepreneurs in India. And it's always fascinating to me to hear about how Status Dynamics Are localized to different markets. On the one hand…

AI assessment note: “I got invites to go to China and speak at various companies.”

Q What companies or content do you most admire, respect in their approach for acquisition of attention on the consumer side?

A That's a tough question. I think every industry has its top, you know, sort of tactics. I will say that Probably there's a reason why Netflix just hired a gaming executive and why Epic is such an interesting company, because I think if you think about video games as an art form, they are social. They're probably the furthest along in building out what we think of as like something that feels like a metaverse, you know, people interacting simultaneously in shared spaces. There may be the most interesting vertical to study in media. You know, I think we underestimate the sheer scale of the gaming industry, right? Especially those of us who are older, but I see the share of attention that things like Roblox get among my nieces and nephews. You might say that the gaming industry is a little bit naive on a lot about social and, you know, whether that will really stick over time is, you know, debatable. The gaming industry still has a lot of issues with trolls and harassment. It had tended to be very male dominated in the past, but all of that is changing. The thing about the gaming industry is they iterate the most quickly of any entertainment medium, I think, out there. And the modern architecture of the game is that you can ship a software update to the app store, have it out in like a week or two. Think about the iteration cycle for games or music or, you know, sometimes it opera…

AI assessment note: “why Epic is such an interesting company, because I think if you think about video games”

Q What companies or content do you most admire, respect in their approach for acquisition of attention on the consumer side?

A That's a tough question. I think every industry has its top, you know, sort of tactics. I will say that Probably there's a reason why Netflix just hired a gaming executive and why Epic is such an interesting company, because I think if you think about video games as an art form, they are social. They're probably the furthest along in building out what we think of as like something that feels like a metaverse, you know, people interacting simultaneously in shared spaces. There may be the most interesting vertical to study in media. You know, I think we underestimate the sheer scale of the gaming industry, right? Especially those of us who are older, but I see the share of attention that things like Roblox get among my nieces and nephews. You might say that the gaming industry is a little bit naive on a lot about social and, you know, whether that will really stick over time is, you know, debatable. The gaming industry still has a lot of issues with trolls and harassment. It had tended to be very male dominated in the past, but all of that is changing. The thing about the gaming industry is they iterate the most quickly of any entertainment medium, I think, out there. And the modern architecture of the game is that you can ship a software update to the app store, have it out in like a week or two. Think about the iteration cycle for games or music or, you know, sometimes it opera…

AI assessment note: “I see the share of attention that things like Roblox get”

Q Can I go a little bit deeper here and say, I get you on status-seeking monkeys, and I totally agree with you, but do you not think that's just because 90% of people are fundamentally very insecure and egocentric, and the 10% who are actually very comfortable with themselves don't give a fuck about status?

A Yeah, I guess It's always tricky talking about human nature. On the one hand, I think we all recognize the universal elements of human nature in ourselves. As I said, you know, in my piece, I have one line which says, one of the easiest ways to control your own happiness is not to measure your status by someone else's scoreboard. But, you know, working in tech, I would say, in particular, in living in the Bay Area, you do see people who are just unbelievably wealthy who are still very unhappy because, you There's always, you know, that next person who's more successful. I mean, tech is one of those, like, complex adaptive systems which behaves by power laws, right? Kind of the Pareto distribution of status and wealth in Silicon Valley is always going to bother some people. There's a heavy skew to it. I think that's probably part of it. What do you think? I mean, you know a lot of people in tech as well.

AI assessment note: “not to measure your status by someone else's scoreboard”