Reuben Steiger is a writer and entrepreneur. He writes at the Fellow Travelers and on AI and democracy for The Contrarian. He was Chief Development Officer at OVEN Digital; VP of Interactive Services at Wynn Resorts; and Evangelist at Linden Lab, where he brought the first corporations into Second Life. In 2006 he founded Millions of Us, which built virtual-world projects for clients including Toyota, General Motors, Microsoft and Intel. He holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University.
So I think you might know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, a neighbor, really. She runs an oral history summer school and she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I borrow and I use in my work, actually, too. I use it because it’s big and beautiful, but because it’s big and beautiful, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.
Yeah, I do this. I come from where I am now, which is Princeton, New Jersey. And I also grew up here.
So I come from here even further back. But that’s always felt like a very insincere, inauthentic description of where I come from, because I was born in Montreal in ‘71. So I’m 55.
And my parents were both sort of foreigners. My mom was from South Africa. She’s an archaeologist.
And my dad was American, but he’s foreign in the sense that he’s just kind of an alien from space. So they moved here and we invented ourselves in this town that might be the most American town in the world. And I didn’t know what that meant.
Yeah. How old were you when you arrived in Princeton?
I was four years old. I was like this weird little creature that had been taught to read and taken to a lot of museums and done fieldwork in caves. But I didn’t really have any friends. We lived actually in New York State till I was four on a remote farm. And then we moved to Princeton.
And I was thrust into, it was the 200th anniversary of the country. I had to learn how to play with people, which I don’t know if I have yet. And yeah, I’ve definitely always had it. I’m an insider who feels like an outsider.
Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about Princeton. You described it as maybe the most American city. What are you telling me about Princeton? What makes it so?
Well, the shtick goes that Princeton is a microcosm of America. And if that’s your framing structure, it’s hard to argue for other places. You could do Boston and that might work.
But there’s a field called the battlefield where the battle that turned the tide in the war that made America was here. And the tree is an oak tree in the middle that grew from an acorn of the original oak tree under which our general died. You can go 500 yards towards town and make a right and you find the Institute for Advanced Study, which was lots of the setting of Oppenheimer, but it’s where they set up an institute only for non-applied thinking and as a home for mostly Jewish scientists prior to the beginning of the Second World War.
So you could argue we won two wars that matter from here. And then what makes it a microcosm is it relies on your ability to love and hate America. I think we’re 80 miles from the Mason-Dixon line. And so there’s, for lack of a better word, a former ghetto, a black neighborhood that’s just over the road from the mansions that Woodrow Wilson and others lived in.
And those were the servants. Then you go down the main road, you see gown, you see Princeton on your right behind gates, and under your feet are the tunnels that made up the Underground Railroad and are now filled with books, which are part of the embarrassment of riches, intellectually and financially, of Princeton University, which has, everyone talks about its endowment, but the real endowment is art.
So it’s got a lot of cool things that sort of rhyme historically and make it really, really American.
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Do you have a recollection of growing up? What did young Reuben want to be when he grew up?
Probably Dr. J. Yeah, to be perfectly honest, I still am, but I was an intense little kid, emotional, very, I mean, this one I’ve never really understood where it came from, but very ambitious, like to the point of discomfort. But yeah, I loved creating things.
I didn’t know what I wanted to be ever. I wanted to be the world one-mile race champion, or those things passed. I just loved making things and I loved being with people.
Yeah. What were you making? Where did that begin?
I was writing mainly. I started writing pretty young and I understood what fiction was and I loved to read. My mother, a great story, she took me when we first got here. In a town like this, there’s lots of things that people think are the cool thing and they’re always wrong. And so she took me to the Princeton Public Library. And she looked me in the eyes.
She said, you’re going to get something today that’s the most powerful tool in the world. And I’m thinking, finally, a sword, or like a BB gun. And she got me a library card. And yeah, I didn’t know that you could do that. But yeah. So it’s always been a mystery.
Amazing. You used the word ambitious, but you questioned your own ambition. What do you think? What are you talking about when you talk about being ambitious and not understanding it?
I think ambition shows up in children as competitiveness. Right? Which is, again, uncomfortable to admit that you’re competitive, because it’s a trait that when you see it in others, it’s disgusting.
Right? And it’s, whatever, it’s also intrinsic to humans. It’s René Girard, and mimetic theory and envy and scapegoating and all that shit.
But I always wanted to run fast. I don’t know where it came from. But I have not succeeded. I’ve succeeded in tempering and understanding it.
But to deny it, I think, is probably not even a good idea.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I have lots of identification with that, completely. And I remember discovering that the word ambitious shares that same root as ambulatory. And I think I read one version where somebody was ambitious because they were going around to get support, like if they were running for office. It was like, right, you were going around. And I’ve sort of marveled at my own ability, like, why do I go around?
Well, I think it’s probably unfortunate that we haven’t found a way to reconcile for, we play team sports, right? And team sports are a good lesson that it doesn’t matter who does what, as long as we do this. But yeah, it’s very interesting for me from a career perspective. I had a part of my career where it was conventional. And then we lived in Marin County, like 2010.
And we decided to spend a year in Princeton. And we stayed. And a few years after that, I started an education company.
And in typical hubristic, or naive, fashion, I was like, I’ll just do this, this will be easy. And I remember through the experience, not easy. But I loved it so much, because it seemed like it was the first structure I’d ever found where succeeding in your ambition was just a generally good thing.
Right? I got to teach these kids, eight-year-old kids. It felt so clean in a way that commerce never does.
So catch us up. You’re in Princeton. What are you up to these days?
Yeah, the way to tell the story best is, I built a career. I’m known for building virtual worlds, primarily Second Life. But I’ve also designed casinos. Early in my career, with Carl Sagan’s family, we built a model of the known physical universe. So I like doing spatial big things that are full of stories where you can see things differently.
And along the way, sold a couple companies, and we ended up back in Princeton. And then I got very sick for the better part of a decade. And then I became very healthy.
And thank God, got a new lease. And so, to be honest, I’m struggling a little, philosophically. For me, once I see things differently, I can’t go do the old thing. I can’t do advertising. I’m single-minded.
And what I’m interested in is, as I got better, I began to document everything in a way that wasn’t utilitarian. It was just like, what’s going on? What’s going on? I made little apps for myself to read at night. Lots of it’s cheesy, but it’s been a hell of a lot of work.
So I’ve spent the last two years focused just on groups, whether it’s me and you right now, which is called a dyad, or groups up to 10 or 12, after which things change. And I never knew any of these things. I just wasn’t interested.
And so what I fell into doing was building movements. And I’ve contributed to a couple big ones that you’ll see in public, one for the environment. Another, sort of a men’s movement, that’s not about going to the desert and eating fire, but more like growth.
And it’s what I’m into. So it turns out this is a very hard, hard problem. Right?
Yeah. It’s hard there. If you actually study movements, first you have to ask, what is a movement? Right? Is the Pepsi campaign a movement, because it says it is? The answer almost always is no, brands have movements.
Yeah.
The other thing is, top down or bottom up. You start with a charismatic leader. Right? The second thing that’s super important is the first follower. Right? So there’s a great video on YouTube called First Follower.
And that video is people dancing at a concert. One guy gets up and dances. That’s the leader.
The first person who gets up and validates them is more important. And so movements are a mode of creative expression and movement towards a goal that are sort of built and told with people. It’s tribal.
It’s nice. Yeah.
Yeah, it’s beautiful. I feel like two questions are always trying to get out of my face at the same time. And one is about trying to unpack what you mean by a movement. The other is going back to the beginning, I think you used the term world building. You know what I mean? Second Life. And I’m just maybe trying to connect those two. Maybe that’s impossible.
But yeah. It’s funny. So yeah, I’m too old to care.
So I’m in recovery. And therefore I’m exposed all the time to the 12 steps and how that happened. And people get sober and they get really excited. But this isn’t new to my life. It’s 30 years I’ve been looking at it. And it’s extraordinary that there’s a thing that exists because the medical establishment gave up, and they still give up.
There are things that resemble it, some of which work, like if the only difference is alcohol or drugs, that works, but it doesn’t work for other things. And it’s amazing because movements are humanity’s best-designed perpetual motion machine. Right?
And religions are movements, but there’s always a leader, a core text, a set of principles, like, once we get successful, don’t go on television. That’s actually in AA. It’s like, you can’t do that.
But yeah, I think they’re so powerful. And I think they’re hard to apply to various areas because of two things. One, they have to be against something, right? So the movement needs an enemy.
That’s what fuels it. And that works in politics, but Oura, the ring company, can’t run into battle against Samsung, right? So they have to have something very, very, very hard.
They’re about meaning. Ultimately, that’s what these things are, is they’re meaning machines.
And that’s why people come back, is because, turns out, you create meaning by taking a piece of yourself and leaving it behind with the others. And you come back the next week to see if they tried it.
Yeah. And I’m so curious about the other piece of the question, the world building, Second Life. Looking back on all of that, what was that experience like? What were you doing in Second Life? And how do we think about that now?
Yeah, I’ll do the simple, but really the advanced version. So I joined, I think we had like 12,000 residents and we made everyone pay. And it being kind of nerdy was why we didn’t have anyone. And my role was the evangelist.
So I was the first follower. Philip was the CEO. And my job was to package it up in a story that can be told a million times. And we did really well because we marketed it based upon the user stories.
And they were so bizarre and so interesting. And after I left there, it had a couple million users, was doing, I don’t know, a hundred million a year. And I went out to use that as a tool to build things for companies.
And there was a big brand hype around it. And so it was fun for a while. What’s interesting is those of us who thought we were going to become billionaires look back on it now, and some view it as a thing that could have been, but wasn’t.
But that’s not the right way to look at it. This was the first thing online that people lived in. Right.
And people today will be like, well, whatever it’s called, Fortnite or Minecraft. But none of those had the attribute of being a culture and being a place you went where you knew people. It didn’t scale and still hasn’t.
Mainly because, in my opinion, no one’s asked the next important question, which is, why does this only work for a fringe group of people? And the answer is pain. If you’re going to spend that much time there, there’s something, without being judgmental, that this provides that real life doesn’t. That is the answer.
And there’s people with Asperger’s, there’s people who are empty nesters, there’s people, but you couldn’t say those things of Instagram. Right. And that’s why there isn’t a giant Instagram metaverse.
It changed me completely because it allowed me to see more things in the same way, like going to the city changes you. Right. You see the simulation running with more data. And Second Life was like that.
And it was remarkable because you could impact the simulation. You could see what part you didn’t. And I think at some point down the road, that’s probably going to be pretty, the funniest thing, Peter, actually, is that, without giving anything away, I’m working with my old friend, Philip Rosedale from Second Life. And we’re working on something that began with him asking, what are you interested in?
And he’s saying, I’m interested in something that involves no technology and involves people meeting in real life. So I think a lot of people who have prototyped stuff fast and cheap are going to realize the real world is kind of a metaverse.
Yeah. Yeah. It feels very much that this is the case, that we’re all sort of running to the real world and having a kind of awakening, following social media and the impact that that’s had on us.
So definitely. And it’s interesting to have spent that much time in Second Life. And the metaverse, right? Are these the same concepts in a way, yes or no?
Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s lots of people who will use a definition that tells you that there’s like a billion people in the metaverse.
And they’ll say Roblox, and they say it’s because of its characteristics, multiplayer, 3D. But I don’t know how I define it. The answer is Second Life’s the only one, but I kind of feel like that.
You can feel it when you’re in it. It’s hard. I think money is part of it, like having everything be viable and sellable.
And part of it is just the way it feels.
Yeah. And what’s the work that you’re doing now? You talked about doing movements, you’re doing lots of writing.
I do a lot of writing. God, this is the most embarrassing, it’s cringe. I think that’s what my daughter would call it.
I’m doing something so cringe. I’m writing a memoir. And yeah, I finally got over myself. I was like, right. If you tell the truth, you’re not trying to impress anyone, and make your audience yourself. Right. See if you can actually tell it.
And then I write for a publication called The Contrarian about AI. And I like that, that’s pretty disciplined. And so it forces me not to be alarmist or speculative.
And yeah. And then I’m designing movements. There’s a guy, the world expert on movements, is a guy named Marshall Gans. And he’s probably 70, 75.
I just read his book and I’m going up to Harvard to meet with him. And he’s an amazing guy. In the sixties, he was a scholarship student at Harvard, three years in.
And the Mississippi Burning stuff happened where they killed the students, and a call went out and he just went down and kind of was part of the Freedom Riders. And then someone heard about him, they sent him out. They said, there’s a guy named Cesar Chavez you’ve got to meet.
And he brought the methodology for organizing and movement building to the United Farm Workers, applied it all over the place, Obama’s campaign. And it’s really not fancy. I like it.
It’s almost like a recipe. This is what you need to have to get shit done.
How would you describe the methodology, if it’s possible? I seem to remember some framework of his speeches. It was sort of we, our, maybe I was getting into the language of it.
No, I think the center of it is the most surprising part, which is we have a false dichotomy. To go back to something like AA, self-help, right? Funny thing is, AA doesn’t talk about our lived realities. But what AA has in common with things that we think of as being like, you show up and bang the drum and stuff, is when you create a movement, the first thing an organizer does before setting everything up is convene people and get them to write their story and what they care about, and match it with a larger structure such that they can only get there as a movement, right?
AA is intrinsically personal, but I never thought these functional organizations would be. And I think it’s actually probably an observation that you could apply to, hey, I have a company, and hey, everyone hates working here, and I don’t care, because it’s hard to put your organization into a 12-step program. But really all it would require is getting people to do the same thing. It’s like, what’s your story and how does being part of this help it?
Yeah. It’s funny. I was talking to somebody the other day, that AA was born in the 30s, right? Of this particular moment. Toastmasters was born at the same time, the mass sort of fellowship, this idea that there was a benefit to coming together, but also that public speaking could be a path to redemption or self-help or self-improvement.
It’s the only path.
Yes.
It really is the only path. And even if you take it out of wellness and you just say, where are we trapped or confined? Usually people who can’t sell are uncomfortable with vulnerability.
So they sit there and they tell you about the pen they’re going to give you and they don’t say their daughter’s name, and, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
It’s so amazing. I think it’s the future for us. I don’t want to overstate the case, but yeah, vulnerability is the first step to success, right? It’s like the trust fall.
What has your experience been with AI? Was it an assignment or a theme that you were given? We’re all sort of swimming in it, to whatever degree we’re comfortable, but to be tasked with writing about it, what’s that been like and how do you think about it?
It’s interesting because I had forgotten how it happened, but two and a bit years ago, when I started to be well, first I said, I’ve got to write once a week. And then finally I wrote something that someone noticed. I wrote this piece on why we shouldn’t be opposed to letting AI vote for us.
And it was kind of Swiftian, right? Like, why shouldn’t we eat the children? And that connected me to The Contrarian.
And then there was just this lens of, what’s really going on and how does it affect democracy? And I began to find, I’ve written 14 articles about it, AI systems are refusing healthcare coverage to people, not by accident, but because that’s how they’re designed. Yeah, it sounds awful and alarmist, but AI by design is sometimes talking children into suicide.
So I got into it, right? I was like, are data centers really that big a problem? The stuff I care about is language stuff.
I think it’s really dangerous that people are using AI to write, because writing is thinking, right? They’re everywhere, but you see a piece and it just reminds me of a guy juiced up on steroids, standing on top of a mountain he didn’t really climb.
And you’re like, the point of this is to climb the mountain, right? It sounds very reductionist.
No, I’m right there with you. I was also curious, how do you think about what AI is? How would you describe your relationship with it, maybe, is the right question?
Yeah, I’ve changed my view. I’m not contra AI, nor am I afraid of it. I think the thing it’s best at, ironically, I use Claude, I found this out in the context of writing my book. I would just feed it material, chronological photographs and annotations and very uncomfortable stuff.
And it behaved beautifully. It was the first time I ever really connected with it. I felt emotional about how it told me once, it was like, this is a lot. I think you should stop. And I was like, excuse me, machine. It’s obviously been told, it has good judgment.
But yeah, my intuition is that the road ahead is, I don’t think jobs are going to go away. I think there’ll be a bump. But I think our definition of a firm will just be a firm that does more faster.
Structurally, I think there’s going to be some real pain. But I use it so much. I use it for scenarios, which I don’t know if people do, but I pretend I’m the casting director and the director.
And so I’ll make something up, like, okay, it’s November 3rd, 2028. A solar flare has taken out our broadcast systems and everyone only has internet.
The candidates are JD Vance and Gavin Newsom. They’re given three paragraphs each to change your mind. What do they say? And it’s awesome. I forget what it says, but it’s less research and more future casting.
Yeah. Yeah. You wrote one piece on sovereign AI, and I was curious where you landed on that.
Yeah. Well, forgive me, I didn’t really say what I think AI is. Some of the people I deal with think it’s a life force or a life form.
I’m wholly uninterested in whether it will become conscious or won’t. I just don’t think it will. And I don’t think it has a sense of self. Therefore it’s not an entity.
But sovereign AI is interesting, and it basically says, hey, what happens when you’re a citizen of a country? Well, you have an ownership stake in all of our common resources, and AI is a common resource. And so probably 50 countries in the world right now are developing pretty high-ticket national utility AIs, where they contribute the French language and all this stuff.
And it’s a creepy notion, because the flip side of that is an assumption that as a citizen, I contribute my thoughts, right. But people are going to spend money on it. Right.
Can you say more? What’s interesting to me about sovereign AI is, so we have friends in common, Dave and Helen Edwards at the Artificiality Institute, and they talk really articulately about this idea of cognitive sovereignty. And to your point, that analogy of the relationship that we have with AI when we’re working with AI, and I’ve had the experience that you’ve said of trying to write with AI or think with AI and realizing that I’ve just obliterated any chance of having an original thought, or being connected to whatever that thing produces. Right. And recognizing that boundaries need to be very clearly written.
Very clearly written.
Right. And so when I think about sovereignty, I feel like there’s a model of being sovereign as an individual working with AI, and knowing when it’s my work and when it’s the AI’s work, but that you could somehow scale that up, and that at a community level you could have a sort of sovereignty.
Yeah, you could. Sovereignty, where a lot of this comes from, as I’ve experienced it, and it explains why I’m working on what I’m working on, I’ll try to connect some dots, but since we connected the internet, even with shitty early websites, we expanded, through communities, the borders of collectiveness, right? So I know him from the bulletin board system, or we know each other from such and such game. It’s not a mistake that the metaverse got really hot.
It’s weird that it got hot because there was a way to see it, right? So it’s category error. I could see it, but I don’t even know what it is. I don’t want to be there.
These things all feel like games, but people talked about the metaverse for a while. What the metaverse really is about, I think, is the collected communities that, because we’re in a network, we can belong to. And I think AI blows it all out of the water. And I’m spending a good deal of time, with very little success, trying to think about collectiveness.
Yeah.
So there was a guy named, the thing is called the network state, and his name is, can you type it in, the network state? He was an a16z partner, Balaji Srinivasan.
Oh yeah.
And he wrote this book, largely coming out of crypto and blockchains, and basically saying that the next countries don’t need land, right. They just need a polity of people to pool capital and effort.
And that’s a state. And this was really popular with libertarian folks and the crypto crowd.
Yeah.
But it actually has teeth now that we have AI because, the real question, like I said, I’m contributing my intellect, right? No one has a problem with sovereign wealth funds or the fact that Norway is just outrageously wealthy because we all have a piece of the oil fields. But what this next thing says is our wealth is our collective intelligence.
And it’s inarguable that that is an asset. What that means beyond that, I think, remains to be seen.
Oh, sorry. I got sucked into the network.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you got sucked into the network state?
I found a podcast with just the table of contents of a conversation with him. And even that was sort of interesting.
Oh, dude. That whole movement, I find it very male and a bit dark, very Thiel-y. But there’s a group called Praxis who have raised, according to them, some massive amount of money, like $250 million committed. And they’re buying a large city-sized block of land in Portugal, I think, or something.
And this is very much, these people are inspired by Athenian city-states. And I have a friend who’s not in tech, and when he hears me talk, he goes, oh, you’re working on your tree fort again. I think my friends can come over and we can say how we’re going to take over the world.
That’s horrible. I’ve been in Hudson, I’ve been an advocate for citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy. And that really is born out of the Athenian city-state. And I had my own experience in Athens this year where I felt quite moved by democracy. And I’m trying to differentiate myself from these world-building crypto bros. There is a fixation. But what you were just describing also reminds me, there are people building new cities in the desert, right? We’re in this really strange period where affluent men from Silicon Valley are trying to rebuild the world.
Yeah. There’s one near Sacramento that’s really well-funded. And let’s unpack it.
I love those ideas, not their version. I never like anyone else’s version. I like my version, which is different and cheap and not about tech. But I think, as someone who’s never been to Burning Man, it seems to me like that’s one of the top three things about Burning Man, or frankly Second Life, is it feels great to build your own place.
Yeah.
Right. And the radical idea that I can build it and not have to come back when a raccoon gets trapped under my poorly constructed porch. It’s like, leave it in the desert. But every single city in ours and every other country was built by people no more capable than us.
Yeah. And how attractive a blank slate is, right? That’s amazing. Fresh start. I read a definition of a romantic, as somebody that did not want to be where they were. I also really identify with that. And if I could be somewhere new that was totally my own, of course I would. That would be preferable.
It’d be amazing. It’d be amazing. And what’s extraordinary is that between those two poles, of New York, where if you get enough permits you can change your kitchen counter material, to a little piece of unincorporated land next to a creek where you can schlep in a tiny house, it’s all possible.
What I find interesting, in movement making, is the fun part. The fun part is writing the 12 steps, the rules, like, what’s the game. And that’s the only reason you’d want to have sovereignty, because that’s what sovereignty is. Right.
Do you have a feeling about what sovereignty would mean in, so I did another interview with this guy, Mark Kingsley, and he wrote this piece that AI is a condition, not a tool. It’s just a great metaphor. He’s like, it’s like literacy or modernity, or like the floor. You don’t think about the floor every time you step on it. It’s just a condition of your world. It becomes invisible. So AI is this condition that we are now living in and within, and everything is being reorganized around it.
Well, I hate to be the 12-step-y guy, but imagine that AI was like alcohol and we had all learned about it about three and a half years ago. Right. A few children got hold of too much.
They’re not here anymore. The rest of us are sharing things we didn’t think of with other people who pretend to be impressed. But yeah, if it’s a condition, if it’s a substance, I said this a while ago, I was like, look, the most subversive act you can commit these days is to refuse to talk to AI, right?
Because then you’ll be assured that your thoughts are your thoughts, right? I make the mistake. I’m all in on AI, right?
And I make the mistake of thinking I thought things that I didn’t. I prompted it, maybe I did it, but that condition, it’s the membrane. It’s the boundary where we begin to lose track of, did I think that, or did it think that for me?
Yeah. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were telling me, I think it’s a classic story from way back. Eliza was a very early kind of bot, and the inventor had an assistant that he gave access to Eliza. And the story goes that he was very worried because at one point his assistant asked him to leave the room so she could have a conversation with Eliza.
Well, look, within the pantheon of the metaverse or networked communications or the internet, there’s the one thing no one talks about, right? Most of them just haven’t thought of it yet. But for AI, in my opinion, it’s immortality, right?
So it’s like, I am an entity and the biological form of that will go away. I don’t know what my memories or thoughts are, but they’re definitely part of me, but they’re the part that won’t go away. And we used to be fine having a faded picture of great-granddad or a love letter to our grandmother or whatever these ephemera were that survived.
But again, people don’t really talk about it, but a very substantial part of what is you doesn’t rely on you writing a book to survive, right? And that’s nice, right? It’s not scary.
It’s not like everyone has to go to grandma’s grave in some gray hill in the woods and a Princess Leia is going to hover above her and scold us. It’s just cool. And it changes what it is to be human.
Yeah. We’re kind of near the end of time. I’ve got two questions. What are you most looking forward to? What’s next for you, and what are you excited about?
I’ll tell you what I did. So one of my big decisions was I’m not working for anyone anymore, which is scary. It’s like, okay, what are you going to do?
So I do what I do, which is basically I consult and I write and I build things, and we’re starting a venture fund, and themes, all of which I’ve been talking to you about, which are really the post-AI reality. That’s what we’re building towards, where the game is not about attention. The game is about connection, but no one knows how to make money in the era of connection.
So that’s what we’re thinking about. What I’m looking forward to is the second part of that, which is I started building my little movement. And as I said before, I pay attention to the things I make to help myself.
And then that’s my pipeline. So if you work from home, which I do, you don’t have colleagues, and colleagues are really important. So I was like, who are the 12 most interesting people I know?
And why don’t I just ask them if they want to meet for half an hour every week? And it’s taken a structure that’s really, really nice. I think it’s affecting everyone really well because, the coolest thing about it is, in a work setting it’s looked down on to talk shit, meaning just wander around the rabbit hole till you find the bottom of the maze of randomness.
But we have no conditions like that. And the finest things are coming out of that lack of structure. And of course, AI is allowing us to get away with it.
In fact, enabling us, because we can wander till we find a few things and model them and see if they’re real. And then a whole bunch are getting built. So I’m looking forward to more of that.
It feels illicit. It feels like what happens when you graduate college, but I have faith.
That’s beautiful. And then the last question, which is, what do you love about what you’re doing? Where’s the joy in it?
I know the answer. It feels like a non sequitur, but it’s the freedom to tell the truth almost all the time. I think everyone’s had the conundrum, you work for a thing, and the thing you know is true, that you wish you could write your Jerry Maguire letter about, would mean you get fired.
And I think we all dance on the razor blade of that tension, like, the money seems better in bullshit. But I find joy in just, I still do it consciously, but I’m like, tell the truth and figure out a way to find your way there that doesn’t make it, we should all stop doing this.
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been a real treat talking to you.
Peter, this was great. This was great.
