I had the opportunity to speak with Venkatesh Rao, writer and strategy consultant who is most well-known for his blog Ribbon Farm, which has a huge internet cult following. Venkat is also known for co-developing the thesis "Venkatesh Rao, (Venkat) is a writer and consultant. Although he abhors the word, he is in my eyes, a strategist's strategist. He's consulted for Tesla and a16z, co-developing the thesis 'Software Eats the World'." with Mark Andreessen. I got to sit down with him to discuss the release of his two books, "The Art of the Gig: One" and "The Art of the Gig: Two." These books are probably the best in a series on free agency and what it's like to go out on your own as a freelancer or an indie consultant. They draw on Rao's body of work, including essays and compendiums that he has written on the topic. He's been freelancing and working as an indie consultant since 2011. During our conversation, we discussed his journey. It was a wide-ranging conversation. I really enjoyed our time together, and I hope you do too.
Key Takeaways
1. Software eats the world — but it doesn't owe loyalty to its evangelists. Venkat's key update to the "software eats the world" thesis: the trend is bigger than any institution that claims to embody it. Silicon Valley may be on the downswing, but the underlying technological whirlwind keeps moving. The lesson for anyone building a career around a macro trend: ride the wave, don't marry the surfboard.
2. The "You Robot" is how you stay human — not how you sell out. Creating a professional persona, a set of tools, and repeatable systems isn't dehumanizing — it's how you avoid dehumanization. The danger is the inverse: letting your tools master you, or relating to other people as instruments. The goal is an organic extension of self, not a performance of productivity.
3. The gig economy's highest-order value is allegiance to dynamism — not freedom from work. Venkat reframes independent work not as lifestyle optimization (the Tim Ferriss critique cuts deep here) but as a philosophical commitment to economic aliveness. The "clutch class" doesn't want protection or collective bargaining — they want to be in the current, moving with the world as it changes.
4. Inner clock vs. outer clock is the fundamental challenge of self-directed work. The pandemic was an accidental experiment in uncoupling from external tempo. Venkat's insight: free agents are always managing the relationship between their internal rhythm and the world's pace. The challenge isn't productivity — it's calibration. Knowing when to plug in and when to let your clock run free.
5. Attend to the world — not your anxiety about the world. "Touching grass" as a meme is still just anxiety performance. Real groundedness comes from genuine, uncurated attention to reality: gloves on the sidewalk, strangers ranting, what's in the trash. The best thinking comes from wide-ranging inputs, not a curated diet of smart people and important books.
Brian Gold
Venkatesh, where am I finding you today?
Venkat
I'm in my home office in Hollywood. Our apartment is in Hollywood.
Brian Gold
Oh, that's nice. As an LA native, I'm always curious, how do you like living in Los Angeles. Do you like it?
Venkat
It's definitely up there among one of the most fun cities I've lived in, but probably not at the top. My wife and I are actually considering moving back to Seattle and looking for a home there. But ya definitely. It's been three years now. I came here for a fellowship at the Berggruen Institute downtown, that was fun. It's located in the Bradbury Building, which was in that famous movie.
Brian Gold
Blade Runner!
Venkat
Yes, exactly. Blade Runner was shot there. I worked there for a year and then after the pandemic started we moved to Hollywood. Now I live close to Griffith Park, that's my running and hiking zone.
Brian Gold
That's amazing! I'm gonna go on a hike with you someday and run Griffith park with you. First of all, just to build a little context here. I'm excited to have you on, and I see you as a modern artist, a business poet that doesn't deal with absolutes. You make sense of reality through modern myth-making, and you've almost created a self-created twilight. You create your own reality with information, and you are incredibly effective with your work. Before we get into the bulk of the conversation, which is what we wanted to talk about today, the Art of the Gig, I wanted to ask you just a couple of questions to get our brains gyrating.
Brian Gold
You were a resident at a16z, further developing the software-eating-the-world thesis in 2022 post-COVID. And with everything that's recently happened with the 2010 startups and Facebook, do you have any patch notes to the master thesis? And I ask because you have talked about this idea of anti-network effects. There's certainly been a noticeable vibe shift, so how do you think about the technology substrate right now?
Venkat
The only patch note I would offer is that software is still eating the world, but the people and institutions who thought they embodied that dynamic are slightly disappointed to find out that the trend is not as loyal to them as they are to the trend. By that, I mean that software eats the world from different places and different dimensions. Silicon Valley might actually be a little bit on the downswing, but software itself from other low sides is still continuing to eat the world. With each new generation, we are seeing more aspects of it. The thesis itself, of course, came out of a16z, and I worked with them elaborating it.
But the broader process of technological change is of course much older. I like to think in terms of technological whirlwinds, I just wrote a blog post called whirlwinds. It's more fundamental sort of weather system that drives the equivalent of global trends. Technology is decades-long whirlwinds or weather patterns that keep shifting. Humans tend to form identity attachments to particular chapters in it, but the thing itself is agnostic and beyond human. You have to move with it; it's not going to stay harnessed to who you think you are.
Brian Gold
That's a great articulation of it. It's more like weather patterns, and it's bigger than any one thing. Ok, OpenAI and GPT-3, I know you wrote a blog post about it. Any blossoming thoughts or how it's going to change. It's everywhere, and it's what everyone's thinking about.
Venkat
I've written one newsletter about it, and I plan to do a series. It's one of those things that doesn't lend itself to instant hot takes. You can come up with clever one-liners about it, or even better, you can ask it to come up with one-liners about itself. But it's a sort of trend that's so easy to get wrong because it invites anthropomorphic projection. It's easy to think of it as a human-like entity that's talking to you and to attribute motives to it. But the more you get into the technology itself, the more you realize that something very non-human is going on there.
These large language models are like a new kind of computational mathematical phenomenon. It's like mathematics at the level that you can do in pen and paper at that level. It's very simple. It's matrix multiplication, which all engineers learn in college. Most of us can do like simple, small versions of their problem.
What we have here is what happens when you take entire data centers' worth of GPUs and have them do lots and lots of matrix multiplication and create these huge statistical objects. Stephen Wolfram calls them 'rule ads.' So they spawn entire universes that run on certain rules. So I think that's a better way to think of them. They're not human-like entities. I think intelligence is even the wrong term to think of it. It's more of a physical phenomenon. One metaphor I've been playing with lately is, you know what cosmic background radiation is, right?
There's this extremely low-temperature radiation that pervades the universe. If you point a radio telescope in a direction, you'll find that low-temperature radiation, like up near absolute zero radiation, and there's that kind of radiation all across the spectrum. And in some bands, like near infrared, there's a lot of noise anywhere you look. And this is the reason the James Webb space telescope has to be put in a hard vacuum and deep out of space in the shadow of the earth and behind a huge heat shield for it to be able to observe anything because there's just so much statistical noise in the band of frequencies that it observes.
So you can think of human thought as being similar, like historical human thought is a kind of accumulation of noise. And what these models do is capture all that noise and create this background of radiation. And the fun thing that's happened is humans who are like a little too robotic and can't rise above the noise, they blend into it. So if you try to, as a... one of the effects I'm seeing is certain kinds of people, like I think of them rudely as Linkedin people, they're like indistinguishable people from this background radiation of what the statistical model produces. And that makes me think of this not as an intelligence, but as a statistical background against which intelligence operates and against which it has to pop. So it's like the bar has been raised, you have to pop from that.
So it'll take a while for us to wrap our minds around what's happening. But definitely it's a very interesting moment. Like it's, in some ways, comparable to Galileo first turning a telescope on the skies and seeing that Venus' faces like the moon or Jupiter has moons. It's a perspective-expanding moment in the collective consciousness. People who are in the field or industry are seeing specialized versions of it and are excited about it the way engineers, technologists, and scientists get excited. But when such a thing gets into the global human consciousness and everybody's able to react to it, you have a consciousness-raising moment. And that's rare and special. I think we are still processing what's happening, and it'll take all of us like a year or so to come to terms with it.
Brian Gold
Last one before we get into it. There's this notion that's been playing out during crypto and right before AI. There was this kind of notion that you need to get community-market fit instead of product-market fit. I know you have these very different substrates of what an organization does, like a product-centric versus user-centric and whatnot. Is this an absolute phase shift or is it just a niche shift? We all know that these are profit-centric to reduce CAC. How do you think about this kind of malaise right now?
Venkat
I honestly don't find it that interesting, as a level at which to understand markets, technologies, and economics because it's a very instrumental way of approaching the task of being a full economic human. You mentioned CAC, right? So customer acquisition cost is a very reductive way of looking at humans in terms of our time series of revenue, how much lifetime revenue they might generate versus how much it costs to acquire them. And things like product-market fit, community market fit, or there's another one, zeitgeist product-fit which some guys at a16z did. It's a very marketer's way of looking at the economy.
And the economy is already a reductive model of the human sphere of experience, and within the economy, marketing is an even more reductive lens on it. I think where that can draw you down, not wrong, but like shallow lines of exploration is when things are changing at such deep levels that the very idea of markets or marketing or individuals whose job it is to relate one entity, namely a business, to another, which is like a group of customers. All those fundamental equations are getting subverted and undermined at deep levels. So, an example of that is I think consumerism is not a permanent feature in history. It's relatively young. It's 150 years old that a distinction between producers and consumers emerged around the 1870s to 1890s, and once it emerged, the idea of a marketer became a well-defined archetype in our world where the marketer's job was to act as the liaison between the producer side of people and the consumer side of people.
Venkat
We are all on both sides in different transactional domains. But what happens when everybody starts becoming more of a prosumer? A lot of what we refer to as "community" is, in fact, people closing the loop within themselves. The whole idea of what a marketer is starts to get undermined. And the idea of market-community fit or product-community fit, all those, you have to go back to first principles and ask yourself, what does all that mean now? So, I think the way I would summarize this is whenever sufficiently deep trends unfold in the world, you have to look in the mirror and ask, "Am I the same person as I used to be before this thing got off the ground? and can I continue to be the same kind of person or same kind of human. Like you refer to me as like a business poet or artist or something. And that made me smile because yeah, I don't think of myself in artistic terms, but I'm fundamentally an engineer and researcher.
Venkat
That's a very strong part of my identity. I spent like 10 years doing like academic research in aerospace engineering, a lot of my histories in mathematics and things like that. But that's an example of that. That was 20 years ago when I finished up my grad school work. And in the 20 years, the world has shifted in multiple ways, multiple times.
That has each time forced me to look in the mirror and ask, all right, who am I in this new context and is this sustainable or do I have to change something about who I am? So this is something I think once you've lived through a few sort of big, deep cyclical or non-cyclical shifts, you get better at doing. You're forced to do it.
Brian Gold
Yeah. I think that's a great segue into what we want to really get into, which is you wrote a limited run Substack newsletter on indie consulting life in the gig economy — the Art of the Gig one and Art of Gig two, both available on Kindle and for print.
You also designed it almost in this kind of Art of War style and the philosophical undertones that were really profound and applicable to me and any operator in the economy — this idea of knowing who you are and becoming your full self, especially within these kind of huge tectonic shifts that you've yourself had to re-contextualize and refactor into your own experience.
And this, I think one of the most profound kind of tenets is like this idea of the inner and outer game. I wanna read you a quote from, he was a McKinsey consultant, but he's one of my favorites — Kenichi Ohmae from his book, the Mind of the Strategist.
Brian Gold
"In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategies to bring about the conditions most favorable to one side, judging precisely the right moment to attack or withdraw, and always assessing the limits of compromise correctly. Besides the habit of analysis, what makes the mind of a strategist is an intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables him to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply to discriminate among different shades of gray. In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character, of each element of a situation, and then makes the fullest possible use of human brain power to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real world do not always fit a linear model. Hence, the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling them in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodologies, such as system analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate non-linear tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking does contrast sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking, but it also contrasts with the approach that states everything on intuition, reaching conclusion without any real boundaries of analysis."
I just love that quote on strategy. I just wanted to set the tone there, but there's so many things that I can pull out from the Art of the Gig. And I know that you started going out on your own in 2011. It's been almost over 10 years now since you've been on your own as a strategy consultant, right?
Venkat
Yeah, 2011. So it's 2022, 11 years. Yeah. Yeah, the quote is an interesting one, and even though I kind of have a low opinion of the modern strategy consulting industry, Ohmae actually belongs to the first generation of OG consultants, and he's, of course, a legend.
I haven't read much by him. I think I've read a couple of articles. And that passage you read out, it's more than a quote. It's a kind of wordy consultant speak version of, say, John Boyd's OODA LOOP, Musashi's Book of Five Rings or Sun Tzu. All these ideas are rediscovered periodically in the strategic dialect of the time, is the best way to put it.
Venkat
When Ohmae was working on the beginnings of modern corporate strategy in the '70s and '80s, that was the language that a lot of people were using. The use of language like non-linear versus linear, for example, is very characteristic of '70s, '80s strategic thinking, where everybody loved the metaphor of non-linear systems.
But then that changed; it became chaos and complexity. So the language changes, but the fundamental ideas remain the same, and you can see the similarity and lineage of familial descent, right? When you go back to the Art of War, Sun Tzu, you might see metaphors in terms of flowing water or wind and things like that. Because those were the domains you can draw on.
Definitely, my books and the original newsletter, by the way, I call it 'Art of Gig' without the 'The,' which is a direct line with 'Art of War.' The idea was definitely to try and situate myself in this historical tradition.
The hard part of that is, when you're trying to be strategic in the modern world in a particular domain, it's very easy to get trapped by very instrumental and operational identities. Like you yourself use the word 'operator' to describe yourself, or even the word 'strategist,' which is a word I would never use because it tends to make people immediately want to throw a pie in your face or something.
So I try not to use specific words to describe myself, but I think the key to reducing this to a praxis as opposed to a set of concepts that you learn in a particular language that you like is figuring out what you're good at, what you can get better at, what you want to do, and so some people might like military metaphors, you might like John Boyd's versions, if you like historical medieval contexts you might like Musashi's aphorisms, if you like vaguely spiritual sounding versions, you might go back to Sun Tzu, there's a lot of places you can draw from, but then you have to reduce this philosophical orientation to practice within your own life, and that comes down to, what are you good at, what can you get better at, what you don't want to do and so forth. And doing that, it's very easy to get drawn into the sheer instrumentality of what you're doing.
Venkat
To give you an example, when the gig economy was beginning, and Tim Ferriss's '4-Hour Workweek' came out in 2007, it was, of course, hugely influential, but kind of made me super annoyed and depressed because it almost gave off this vibe of being small-minded. I'm going to be living in Southeast Asia and selling junk vitamins to people, basically score this free lunch off the world and living this very philosophically uninspiring life.
At some level, you can see that writers of his cohort recognize that because I think the last chapter of the book is about how to address the void inside you, and the void shouldn't be there in the first place. If you're living life as a whole human being, you shouldn't be living in ways where there's a growing dark void that you then have to address by going on a meditation retreat.
Your whole life should have the wholeness that doesn't take you down that road of a split personality of a void versus four-hour worker or something like that. So yeah, in my practice in the last 10 years and in what I tried to capture in the newsletter, in the books, it's about can you be whole in the persona you bring to your work without reducing yourself without reducing your label in either in a role linguistic sense? Or in a deeper sense of putting yourself in a straitjacket that's a limiting self conception. So I think that's the larger philosophical message that I'm trying to convey. You don't want limiting self-conceptions, that's the larger reason to go into the gig economy at all. Because it allows you to be your full self in a way that traditional organizations don't.
Brian Gold
There's this passage that clearly and distinctly says that. "When I started in 2011, there was little to no useful advice on how to actually go about crafting a satisfying and meaningful life out of internet-enabled gig work. Much of what was out there at the time was just about entrepreneurship and sales, and almost all of it was useless because indie consulting gig work, as you say, is not like either of them."
Venkat
It's not necessarily useless, but as I said, it's a limiting self-conception. A lot of it, like you mentioned, sales, has a lot in common with the pickup artist movement, which overlaps with the lifestyle design crowd. It's almost dehumanizing to run those playbooks. Those playbooks will work if you want to do very specific things, like work four hours and make a lot of money selling junk. I used to not be so openly critical of it, but I'm getting more critical of it as I get older. I do not like dehumanizing anyone. It's especially bad to dehumanize others, but you have to be kind to yourself as well. Dehumanizing yourself is a bad thing to do. It can work, but at a cost.
Brian Gold
One of my favorite passages was the idea of the "you robot." It's a paradox that you pointed out, that creating your own you robot, in a sense, will also make you more human. And I think that's honestly what I'm dealing with as well. I have to create these social, economic, and cultural artifacts, and I want to do it in the most authentic way.
How did you get to that mindset and realize all of those insights? It was just profound. I know it's a simple example, but I found it really helpful in framing the idea that you have to be comfortable in your own skin, especially in the gig economy, which is like this economic outer space that you need protective gear for.
Venkat
It's one of those things that comes to you when you think about your relationship to your tools and your relation to other people, often people get those two relationships exactly crossed. They relate to other people as though they were tools and they relate to tools as though they were living human things. So they get attached to their tools and it starts to define their identity. For example, SEO is a good example, a lot of people that went down the internet marketing selling vitamins down the road, their tool was SEO and was driving traffic, and it's possible to do that in principled ways, my buddy Tom Critchlow runs this thing called the SEO MBA, and I think he brings the right product and philosophical attitude to SEO, but you can have the wrong misplaced attitude where SEO becomes the dehumanizing tool in which you are over identifying with and you're seeing everything as "How can I turn this into more and more clicks?" That's one aspect of it, and then it affects how you relate with people, you stop seeing them as humans, you start seeing them as clicks. And this becomes very obvious in how you appear in public. Instead, if you have a philosophical relationship with your tools, something else happens. I'll give you an example.
Venkat
I'll give you an example. My primary tool is the WordPress blog. As you said, I don't use a lot of technology. And there's a reason for that. It's not that by training I'm not an engineer, of course, and in my past as an engineer, I've used a lot of technology. But when it comes to creative expression, if you cannot get into a sense of a relationship with your tool, where it's an extension of your body, but not one that controls and dehumanizes you, it's not a good tool for you. A good example is, I don't know if you watched the old Spider-Man movie with Doc Ock, right? He's got those mechanical arms, and then the chip blows up and the arms take over his brain. You don't want that to happen. You want to be in a relationship, not necessarily in a relationship of mastery with the tools, but they have to be an extension of yourself in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Venkat
So I think Musashi has something like this to say about swords, for example. But yeah, I take WordPress, like I started using WordPress in 2007, and I never at any time had the conscious thought, I'm trying to learn WordPress and become really good at it and optimize my use of it to reach things. It was just a really fun technology to play with, and slowly master. And I got lucky because I grew up along with WordPress. It was a very early release, relatively primitive blog when I started, and today it's a really advanced and mature, maybe even obsolete, blogging platform. But I grew along with the tool, and it was only in hindsight that I was able to realize that I had mastered the tool. When I saw new people struggling with WordPress, and I could help them out with lots of tips, I thought, "Oh shit, I know a lot more about WordPress than I thought I did." That's what making a tool an extension of yourself organically feels like, and I think that's really critical. That's the idea of a "You Robot," to have that relationship with all the tools you build your life around. You want them to become organic extensions of yourself that create a sum greater than the parts. The dark way to go is adding more and more tools, and they all enslave you more and dehumanize you more and more. Other people look at you and say, "Hey, you're relating to me not as a human at all, but as a tool, and you're treating me as a tool in all senses of the word tool.
Brian Gold
Beautiful. You also mentioned that this kind of series was a way for you to position yourself in like kind of like this territory of consultants. I think one of your most brilliant articulations of that is the 'Clutch Class'. We do not waste time on collective action political mechanisms.
"We let individual instincts guide us and rely on emergent network dynamics and the power of exit rather than voice to drive political change favorable to us. We are clutch. We do not try to directly compete with capital by accumulating enough of it to be a player on that side. Most of us have a lifestyle business goals make enough to have a good life, but don't kill yourself becoming a multi-millionaire."
I just thought that framing was just like, yeah. 'Cause I've always had this weird thing. It's like when I'm advising CEOs and CMOs and then also I'm also able to relate to all substrates of like capital and labor. But your articulation, you do this thing where you do this step function of just breaking it down and then you break it down even further. So how did you get to that insight? What were you thinking?
Venkat
Over the last 10-12 years, we've seen a growing conversation about the gig economy, which I think is very naive. On one hand, you have the traditional labor crowd pushing for unionization, using mental models from the 1920s. On the other hand, you have politicians who want to target big gig economy companies like Uber or Airbnb, without really caring about the workers one way or the other. To them, it's not the interest of the workers that's at stake. To them, they want to use the existence of these workers, and use them as a political constituency to target the Ubers of the world. But I don't think either of those agendas is right for us. When it comes to self-advocacy, we need to make some distinctions.
For example, in the book, I distinguished between the platform or class, which includes Uber drivers, who may have more of a case for collective action, than people like you and I who do relatively individual work.
Venkat
You do have to make those distinctions. I don't want to be absolutist about it. The unifying feature of the indie consultant layer of the gig economy is that there is no unifying feature. Which is why collective action is a bad idea. Which is why we are all individually sneaking into cracks of the economy and trying to find our way and get somewhere interesting.
However, I do think there are some common features, even though it's not enough for collective action. One of them is that I think the upper reaches of the gig economy, you find people who are most fully committed to what I think of as economic dynamism. By that I mean, everyone talks about wants the economy to be dynamic, flourishing economy, generative, and creating more wealth and prosperity for all. But if you look around to see who really means it, very few people do. Big company don't want dynamism; they want a monopoly and would rather not have competition. They would rather have moats from competitors from entering.
You look at politicians they don't want dynamism either. What they want is easy rents and easy ways to collect taxes with minimal effort. Even honestly, local and small businesses types, people who you think would be in favor of it, what they want is like a protected economy where they can be lazy and stay small and not innovate and have a booming mom and pop business that gets to operate inefficiently because its cute and it's in a small town. Nobody really wants dynamism. Definitely not the union organizers.
But the people in the indie consulting economy, especially at least the ones interesting to talk to, they have an attitude of allegiance to the larger currents in the global economy. They are excited by a thriving economic environment. Software eating the world is an example. I'm sure if you went to the early 19th century, you would see people equally excited about steam power. You get this sense of big things are afoot. The world is changing in good and positive ways. I want to be a part of it. I don't want to necessarily control it like a dictator, I don't want to make life other peoples' responsibility to care for. I don't want to complain about what I used to do becoming obsolete. I just want to be part of this generative creativity.
Venkat
And I think the only people who have that attitude towards that dynamism is people in the gig economy. Even down to people even down to Uber drivers. Even though there may be a little bit of a case for collective action. I hate to use the word "hustle" because it's associated with hustle porn and the Silicon Valley meme sense, but there's still a "philosophical hustle" toward being really alive in the world.
Brian Gold
I love it, and I completely agree. In terms of the gig economy, I want to ask you a broader question now. Do you have any go-to advice for recent college grads now? Personally, I don't know if I would actually recommend them going down the path of advertising or consulting or becoming a product manager. How are you thinking about advice to the youth when things are changing so quickly?
Venkat
I don't think they need advice, honestly. Every generation figures things out for itself. At least for just getting started, people are generally best off taking most of their cues from people in their own generation. Once they've started, older people can help with more general insights. So, I wouldn't say I'm the first person people should come to for advice. I'm probably the second or third person.
By that I mean, I look around at fresh college grads or even high school grads getting into blockchain programming, they don't really need advice. They're diving in, learning all the technology, and figuring out how to make money. Many of them are making more money than I ever will. Or, take 14-year-olds figuring out all the hacks of making YouTube channels work or becoming TikTok celebrities. So, I think getting started for an 18-year-old out of high school or a 22-year-old just out of college, the best thing to do is look around and see who's doing very interesting things that don't make you roll your eyes or get utterly bored.
Venkat
We've all had the experience of seeing classmates doing utterly boring shit like preparing to get into a particular kind of job and you can't bear to talk to them for more than five minutes. But hey, they get into those jobs, make big money and you feel a little insecure initially in relating to them. But then there's these other kids who are like completely wild and maybe spiral out of control. So there are the other extreme, but somewhere striking a balance. You've got people who have like enough common sense to like, take care of their practical needs in a pragmatic way, but they also have enough imagination to see what's new in the environment that they can ride to, like generational success. They have the boldness to take the right kinds of risks, and those kids usually set the tone for others. And then the most imaginative and creative kids follow the lead of these pioneers. Now this is where I think at some point it helps to go beyond your cohort because one of the downsides of industrial schooling is it encourages you to take all your cues from your own cohort. It's like older people are clueless and completely out of touch. Younger people are like children and talk babies.
Only people your own age seem worth listening to. Now that's dangerous. Like they're useful for picking up on interesting starting directions. But as you like, start to think at higher levels of abstraction and like patterns that can last a lifetime rather than just the next few years, who knows where blockchain programming will go?
Or even if you're making good money, minting NFTs or making YouTube videos. Now whether that's something that's like both psychologically sustaining for a lifetime and economically sustainable in that the trend lasts or not, right? So once you realize that you have to like, think about your life at multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from like, how do you wanna look back at your life when you're on your deathbed to if you choose to marry and have kids, how would you like your kids to look at your life and either admire or despise you?
Venkat
So all those levels of abstraction, each of which has a practical level, it's useful to talk to people older than you who've been on different journeys. Not so much in the mode of give me advice or like, how should I do X, Y, and Z? Which can be useful. Yeah, I can, I've consulted in the semiconductor industry for a decade and if some younger person wants to ask me how to operate there, I can give them specific advice but more like treating older people as human case studies. So they're neither deserving of contempt as in everybody's like a dad joke and I, there's nothing I can learn from those laughable people, nor as like uncritical admiration.
You shouldn't be looking at older people with oh wow, they've accomplished so much. And then you have this sense of adulation that you never overcome. No, you have to see them as people who represent data points in your own training set. And for better or worse, they lived in a different time and, lived their life stages in different times. I'm a product of the eighties and the nineties mostly, right? But if you can make sense of history, you can get lessons out of my life by just looking at how I live. So I think that's the higher level skill to develop and for people who are on the other end giving advice, it helps to think of yourself as a data point. So just as it helps to think of yourself as a robot. It helps you think of yourself as a data point and present yourself that way. You can only speak to your own experience and how you've witnessed yourself and the world through your experience. And it's the counter-party's job to mine what intelligence they can out of it.
Brian Gold
Yeah, absolutely. I know you've been consulting in the chip industry. That's such an incredibly interesting space for me as well. I've been reading about the history of chips, Fairchild, and it seems like we're going from a period of centralization to decentralization, with all these specialty SMB businesses. The whole supply chain, lithography, everything is interesting. Are there any new vectors that you're thinking about in that space that really excite you and recharge your batteries? Or it could be related to the chip industry or not?
Venkat
Yeah, there's a lot going on there in recent times. So of course it's a long complex industry with a history. Like you said, it began with the invention of the transistor. Fairchild and all that. So there's five generations of stories to tell and I've talked to people who were just entering it ranging to the other end people who've been veterans of it, like way back when. So at the very foundations Moore's Law has now got a good question mark attached to it. Like at the physics level, we are right now shipping five nanometer chips and there's gonna be three nanometer, one nanometer, going down to picometers and beyond. Then we'll go down to reaching the limits of physics, at which point you'll need fundamentally different kinds of technologies. That's one big thing to look out for. Is it the case that we are down to the last few doublings or so forth?
Venkat
So the upper limit of the estimate I've seen of how much improvement is possible is actually about a hundred X from today. Which historically speaking means we are very close to hitting our heads on the ceiling because we've had so many exponential doubling so far. So a hundred X is a lot from where we are now. Like you could take something like the data centers that are used to train GPT and reduce them from thousands of GPUs to maybe like a $500 box maybe in 10 years. So some people think that's possible. But then yeah, it might end. Who knows? Maybe they'll be quantum computing, maybe not. So that's the foundational thing everybody has to think about. Layered on top of that, of course there's like all the geopolitical dynamics manufacturing has moved out to Asia. TSMC is now like a big geopolitical football like nuclear technology around World War II and more directly accessible levels for people like us who use computers rather than work in fabs. Yeah. We are already seeing the latest generation of chips in our phones and laptop computers with lots of AI cores. If you bought recent MacBook Pro, you'll notice that it has AI cores. We've got custom silicon for dealing with video processing. Soon there might be custom silicon for dealing with crypto stuff.
Who knows? So there's like lots of I would say divergence happening where the silicon substrate of our life is like diverging in many different directions. So computers used to be one sort of thing for nearly 70 years. They got smaller and smaller every decade, this is called Bells Law, you got a new kind of computer. So you went from mainframe to mini to personal to laptop to smartphone size. And now you have raspberry pie size, like $10 computers and so forth. So that's form factor shrinkage mainly, but what I'm talking about is variety. Now you're gonna have so many different kinds of things that we call computers that it's really going to stop being meaningful to refer to them as computers at all. If you have smart AR glasses, they're really more like glasses. If you have a smart home computer that runs all your appliances somehow, that's really not a computer so much as a smart home. So it's like almost like the variety of computing and its cost performance is going in directions, but you can think of it as like intelligence being dissolved into the environment.
Venkat
So everything around you is getting smarter because compute is getting cheap enough and powerful enough and diverse enough that it can like, seep into every corner of reality. So yeah, very exciting times to be working in the semiconductor industry at any level.
Brian Gold
Yeah, you also have a concept in the book about picking your own basket of accelerators, right? And adapting that to yourself and your career. So certainly, that industry is something you can draw from, right?
Venkat
Yeah. Like right now is speaking of young people it's not one, but two big compute trends AI and crypto, which are both highly accessible and open.
You don't have to pass a range of interviews to get into Google, to do good work and just go to GitHub download machine learning models or like blockchain software and start hacking away. You can join open projects, you can put in pull requests. You can do it. And this is at the software level, but there's like plenty of room for all sorts of people. There's artists figuring out ways to do NFTs using generative AI, and that's like a new form of art. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of ways to get in right now.
Brian Gold
But yeah, there's just so much, it's overwhelming. Do you, with your knowledge of these trends and staying on top of everything, where do you get your inspiration from? I know you're a big reader. What kind of things recharge your batteries?
Venkat
I don't think there's anything special about that. It's just the same sort of stuff. Everybody consumes books, keeps up with what's on social media. Talk to a lot of interesting people. So I think there, I might have a slightly different approach. I wrote this article bunch of time back called "Don't Surround Yourself with Smarter People". This is a heuristic that a lot of people hand out. It's always surround yourself with smarter people. I think that's a dumb thing to be, like that makes you the dumbest person in the room. And are they really smarter than you if they wanna hang around with dumb people? My alternative heuristic is hang around with people who are differently free from you.
Venkat
By that they're free in different ways and constrained or blind in different ways. So they might see things that you can't, they can see like possibilities you are blind to.
And conversely you can see possibilities they're blind to. That's what I mean by differently free. And I think I get a lot of my input fuel by doing exactly that. So a bunch of people that I talk to often, they tend to be quite different from me, and they're like able to see things that I'm usually blind to and vice versa.
So I think that's one good curation method. And I think increasingly now another, like super important one is really get connected to material reality that's not mediated by symbols or media, by which I mean not reading, not video consumption, not entertainment media, but there's an actual world made of atoms out there and it's weird how few people just even go around on walks these days and just notice what's going on. Who's walking around, what are they doing? If you see a homeless person ranting, what are they ranting about? What kind of trash is in public trashcans. There's a whole world of experience and data out there to draw on, and it's all data.
So I think it's a bad mistake to just try and consume only lofty, curated polished and aestheticized data from the best books and the smartest people and the most interesting people. Yeah. That's a very bad way to curate your input. You wanna make it much more broad ranging than that.
Brian Gold
Yeah. I definitely fall into that trap sometimes.
Venkat
We all do.
Brian Gold
And it's yeah. Yeah. I mean it's anxiety producing. It's oh, this guy made millions doing crypto, or drop shipping, or whatever. And it's just, you don't wanna do that. It creates a doom loop for yourself.
Venkat
Yes, that's the negative side of what you wanna avoid, but as a positive example I have a friend Christina, she's a professor at USC. And we were both at the Berggruen Institute at the same time as fellows there. And she has a hobby that she plays with friends with, which is taking pictures of gloves. That she finds on the sidewalk. If you walk around LA you'll notice gloves all over the place. So that's again I'm in a little ring of co-conspirators. Now we just send each other pictures of gloves. We find this is a way of attending to the world in sort of an open-ended uncurated way, where you're really noticing the way the world is like through the pandemic. We both noticed that there were a lot more of the disposable surgical gloves all over the place. It's sometimes when you go hiking you notice like people's gloves dropped on the trail. So the reason I'm bringing that up is that's I think the default way you should be attending to the world in terms of like little signals out there that you don't prejudge as important or valuable or anything. It's just you're paying attention to the world as opposed to like your own motives and needs.
Brian Gold
Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of the Cloud Appreciation Society where they literally send each other pictures of clouds. In downtown LA, there's a great exhibition of these beautiful LA communities such as the LA Breakfast Club. It's one of those things that I think we've over-indexed in this saturated media environment, this digital world. There's a whole other world, and you call it being close to reality or a reality arbitrage, making sure you pay attention to wider things because unexpected ideas and everything can come from there, right?
Venkat
Yeah. It's a, I think there's more to it though. Like right now there's this meme doing the rounds of "Touching Grass". I don't know if you've heard this, but the way people talk of unplugging from digital media and like symbolic information is go touch grass.
Venkat
But when you think about it…
Brian Gold
I actually love that meme by the way…
Venkat
Where it comes from. It's like this aestheticized reactionary sentiment of ooh, the ideal perfect world away from this dress of social media is this idea of like beautiful nature with like lush grass that you touch. And if you think about that, you're ass trapped by your mental models. If you think in terms of the metaphor of touching grass as if you were like just looking at beautiful pictures on Instagram, because most parts of the world, grass is actually a very artificial part of the landscape. Like here in LA it's a natural desert. If you're touching grass, you're probably touching somebody's home that shouldn't be watered in this drought at all. So it's almost like you're not attending to the world. You're attending to, like a sense of anxiety you have about your media consumption and almost reaching for some I don't know, stylized sense of connecting to the world rather than actually connecting to the world.
And the reason I wouldn't recommend touching grass and touching gloves because they're mostly filthy and disgusting. But attending to gloves is interesting because sometimes they're really disgusting. Other times you like see like interesting looking gloves in unusual places and it's a moment of like artistry in the world. It's you know in that movie American Beauty where the guy finds a dancing paper bag in the wind, it's that kinda like moment of art in the wild. So it's a more I dunno, and it should be something you find that speaks to you.
It shouldn't be like a meme you're writing, like touching grass. If you take it literally, it's hey, everybody's talking about touching grass. So I will go out and touch some grass and come back and then post a picture of that graph and say I touched grass. It's like there's something really ridiculous about that. So you have to find your own way to connect to reality.
Brian Gold
Yeah, there's so much to unpack there. I had a friend and I love him to death, but, I played World of Warcraft as a kid, so I was just immersed in MMOs very early in my life. And he recently had gone into Twitch and during the pandemic, and he made a close group of friends.
And I had said something like, dude, those friends aren't real. And he got really mad because he was just so immersed. And saturated by that media environment. And so like sometimes I use like that heuristic dude, you need to go touch some grass just because you need to get back to base reality.
And I think that's like my favorite use of the meme, but I totally agree with you, I think what you're also speaking to and what you're always doing is this idea of form and function and substance and form. Like a lot of people have this like idea and image in their heads of what it is and they're actually performing performative behaviors and they're almost LARPing their existence. I think that kind of like, drips through into a lot of your writing, which I think is incredible.
But a lot of the work, especially whether it's Art of the Gig or Breaking Smart or Tempo I think one question that I had is, is there like an underlying like media theory behind all of this? Because I know you've written about time, like for instance, like how we've shifted to chaotic time, right? And this idea that we've moved from Chronos to Kairos and I think about this because if for instance like time has collapsed and we're in this like saturated media environment, then it behooves you to create your own reality with information. It behooves you to create your own future and your own assets. So that's how I'm like thinking about that in my mind. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Venkat
Yeah, so this is the book I'm working on right now. The working title is the Clockless Clock, and it's a sequel to my older book Tempo. And yeah, that's the basic theme that time in a sense is constructed. And it's one of the most fundamental things we do, and it's something you do unconsciously, whether you know you're doing it or not. And the reason, everybody does it is when you put people under extreme stress if they're tortured as prisoners of war, for example the sense of time can actually collapse. That's what PTSD is. The sense of time can collapsed. People have studied this. It's a sense of having no future in a very visceral sense. Like you literally cannot be consciously aware of living in time. You're like a point in time rather than an extension. So yeah, it's a big sort of undercurrent of thought in everything I do. I wouldn't call it a unifying theme or an overarching theme because I'm not that hedge hoggy. I don't have unifying theme, but it is like a through-line interest. And often when I'm thinking of completely random new things that catch my eye, one of the thoughts that will occur to me is, oh, how does this touch upon how we experience time?
How does this reshape our relationship to time? So often the time aspect of any new subject or idea is the first one that I'm sensitive to. When you say, is there a media theory underlying it. I guess I could say that. But I guess media theory is not really the frame of reference for me as such yes, I've read McLuhan, and I like McLuhan. But overall I don't think in terms of media at all. For me it's more I would say if I weren't trying to write for a general audience about time. I would say my fundamental frame of reference is probably physics and psychology. This goes back to the Einstein vs Bergson debates in the, in 1922, I think. So Bergson is a philosopher psychologist who insisted on a subjectivist view of time. And Einstein famously said the time of the psychologists or the time of the philosophers doesn't exist. So that's the tension I like to work with, which is an interestingly different frame from media theory because it drags you into like the more foundational questions.
Venkat
Whereas if you take a media theoretic approach to it, you tend to focus on questions like, how do you experience time when you're online versus offline is media consumption, how it relates to time. It gets you at a different set of priority questions. They're equally interesting and valid. But yeah, I tend to focus on I guess the more fundamental sort of aspects of time.
Brian Gold
Yeah, I've recently read the philosopher Byung Chul Han. He writes about time. He wrote a book called 'The Scent of Time' and another called 'The Death of Rituals'. It's like there's a collapse of rituals that used to allow us to externalize ourselves and have a sense of place and space in time. Without these communal rituals, people are trying to fill a God-shaped hole in their heart. Those books are pretty interesting.
Venkat
I have a very conflicted relationship to the idea of rituals and time specifically, like smells and time sounds like a really interesting angle because at a very fundamental neurological level, smells are very evocative at the lowest level of the brainstem. For example, they're strongly linked to memory, and if you smell a particular smell, you only smell as a child, it'll transport you back very powerfully to that time. So that's, yeah, a lovely thing that would be interesting to discuss for a long, for hours. But ritual is interesting because it's, there's an element of aestheticizing your relationship to time in a way that's dangerous. It's makes you vulnerable to reactionary tendencies and forms of belonging and community that can be extremely dangerous. And I see this is one of the, I think generational things that's quite strong in Gen Z. It's they've picked up on this ritual aspect of relating to time or like being in time. And I guess I just wanna flag that as, it's one of the things that concerns me because rituals are like there's many things I think of as like great servants and poor masters. Rituals is one of them. A ritual is a great servant, a bad master. If a ritual becomes your master, there's a reason serial killers are often depicted as having like obsessive compulsive ritual behaviors around their killing. And fascism often has a very ritual component to how it like attracts new adherents and how it performs its politics. It's a very ritualized kind of politics to it.
Brian Gold
Yeah, I totally agree. I think just in relation to the Art of Gig that's like why you have these principles of like self-management, self-structuring, self-direction, self-defining, self ceremonialize, self-pacing, self-socializing. Because I'm sure you've realized that you had to sync your internal clock and you had to build an idea of how your internal clock operates in relation to this gyroscopic external world, right? Can you speak a little bit to that?
Venkat
I was just thinking about that yesterday actually. And so this is an update from what I put in the book. Yeah, in the book I talked about like a lot of these self terms self-management, self-ceremonializing is the ritual aspect of that where you have you have to create your own rituals when you're tuned out from the rituals of a workplace. So all that is part of what you do to create sort of your robotic self with which you operate in the world. But the idea of plugging an inner sense of time to an outer sense of time. Thinking about that, like the pandemic has been an interesting large scale experiment in time cultures for all of us.
Like all of us, unless you were in the front lines of hospitals or emergency workers. For us it was a little bit of a quiet time as opposed to a frantic, busy time, right? Unless you got covid or working to cure people of Covid. It was like the world hit the pause button. The tempo of the external world went to almost zero and we were all basically down to our internal clocks. So you could say that the pandemic for 80%, maybe 90% of us was external clock goes to zero, and internal clock now is free running. It's those time deprivation experiments where people are put in caves or something and their inner clocks attains its natural frequency. So one of the interesting things people discover when they do that kind of experiment is a natural body clock is actually I believe slightly faster or slightly slower than 24 hours. And this is because the earth's has been flowing over time. So it's that kind of like moment where the pandemic allowed us all to get in touch with our inner clocks and we all did our thing. Like I got into 3D printing and electronics and astronomy as hobbies. Lots of other people did other things, but the interesting thing that's happened in the last year is the outer world's clock has started up again.
Venkat
And now one of the things that I have regrets going on is my pandemic hobbies are falling apart. I'm not able to plug them back into the real world. And part of the reason is I enjoy dabbling, for example, in electronics, but I'm obviously not talented enough to actually do useful electronics in the external world where there are professional engineers building electronic gadgets.
So my little amateur thing has like an impotence mismatch with the external world of electronics innovation. So there's a sort of, temporal mismatch. My inner clock is running too slow to be useful in the outer world, but I can no longer be unplugged from it. So now I have to manage that. So it's like, how does it remain a hobby?
Or can I speed up my inner clock so I can usefully plug it into the outer world? So yeah, those are the thoughts I've been thinking lately. So it's broader than the gig economy because this affected everybody no matter what kind of life they were leading. But I think in the gig economy, we were always in this mode of managing the relationship between inner and outer clocks.
Everybody got a taste of it. But yeah, we of course have to continue doing that now.
Brian Gold
More so than ever. A little bit there.
Venkat
But yeah, that's what I've been thinking about lately.
Brian Gold
Amazing. I just have a personal question. Do you have a routine or a writing process? I know you're not into meditating, and you don't really care about that, there's not like a habit thing, but just wanted to ask the question.
Venkat
No, I don't, I deal very badly with processes, basically. So maybe just not to say that every day is like a weird adventure. The opposite of having like good disciplined habits isn't having chaotic one every day. It usually means half the days get lost to least effort laziness.
Like I might get up, make my breakfast. So yeah, that's morning ritual of coffee and breakfast is there. But after that, it's if I, if the mood doesn't hit me to write and there are no meetings, I might just crash on the couch and like stare off into space for a couple of hours before it's time for lunch, and then I go, maybe go for a walk. And these days by four o'clock it's already starting to get dark and the day's done and have a couple of hours of TV and I'm done. So yeah, it's yeah, to the extent I have a routine, it's not around productive behaviors like writing or working on projects or consulting. It's a routine around being in goblin mode and like just degenerating into not very productive modes. But it's one of the things I've learned is those moods come and go. So yeah, there are periods when inspiration strikes and for days on end I'll be doing good, interesting stuff. And then there'll be weeks on end where I'm in goblin mode and not doing very much or accomplishing very much. And when I was younger or 10 years ago, that would be a cause for a lot of anxiety for me.
I would be like, I'm not doing enough. I should be working harder. I should be putting in X hours a day and making progress on all these projects I'm pretending to do. Now I'm a lot more forgiving of myself. It's yeah, I have 10 projects, but project number one, which trumps all of them, is just lay around doing nothing. And I'm okay with that. And I'll work on all the other 10 projects as in when I get the energy. And so long as I'm enjoying myself and paying my bills, I'm happy with that.
Brian Gold
Okay. That's amazing to hear from you because I think that's where I'm at, where I'm over pressurizing myself with all these projects. And you have a chapter of it in the book about just, making sure to hide away from yourself. And that's like this, like refuge for yourself to, be able to be okay with yourself and forgive yourself for not being like ultra productive.
Venkat
Yeah. And this is, remember, it is very individual. Like I think I'm a pretty low energy person, not very disciplined and not very ambitious. Other people have higher natural levels of energy. They may be more ambitious. So it's like you have to find your own sweet spot and accept who you are and like, very consciously pick the things you want to change and then pick the things you're not going to change.
And you're like, I'm okay with that. Even if it's something that other people may not admire in you and might even like, complain to you about. A lot of people are constantly berating me for oh, you should be doing more with this thing, or you're leaving money on the table, or you should be, I don't know, making audiobooks of all your books. It's yeah, there's how many more you can do. It's but laying on the couch is often the best thing you can do.
Brian Gold
Does Venkat have any guilty pleasures or, participate, watch junk tv? Do you watch Severance or White Lotus or any of those shows that we're all watching right now?
Venkat
I did watch Severance and I finished the first season of White Lotus. Both were pretty good. Yeah, I would say my main guilty pleasure is TV now. I think Gen X which I'm part of is probably the last generation for which TV rather than the internet was the formative influence in our lives. So we grew up with TV of the main kind of media we consumed as. And as adults, I think we continue to literally watch TV on physical TVs. Like I know when a lot of younger people tell me they're watching a show, I know they're watching it on their phones or laptops or something. Whereas for me, it literally is, I'm not on a keyboard device. I'm literally on my couch with a remote control and watching streaming television on an actual television.
Venkat
So yes, that is a guilty pleasure and fortunately it's one I share with my wife. Yeah. And I think there's, there was all a lot of like bullshit moral panic in the eighties and nineties of people are watching too much TV and it's ruining your brains or whatever. And I think that's, invariably and always bullshit. There's always people who want everybody else to get off the couch and do something other than watch TV or play with their iPads or play video games. They're always wrong. If you wanna zone out watching several hours of tv, more power to you or video games or when your pleasure is.
Venkat
I think one of the more valuable things you can do as you get older is actually simply stop apologizing for what people always told you was flaws or weaknesses of character when you were younger. But now that I'm 48, I'm like, Hey, I managed to make it to 48 and I'm not like homeless on the streets or dying or whatever. It can't be all that bad, so screw you. I'm sticking with this habit and one of the things that happens when you say such things when you're 48. I think it's it has a permission-ing effect on younger people. It's yeah, trust your own judgment. Don't let other people sermonize or lecture you on things being weakness of character or not working hard enough or something. Because usually there's an agenda behind when people tell you those things. It's yeah, if you think what feels like a waste of time to your parents or like harder working peers is like fulfilling for you, go ahead and just trust yourself and do more of that.
Brian Gold
Yeah, it's like gaming, too. And then it just became huge, like in the last 10, 15 years. I had this funny anecdote where my mom would tell me not to watch TV or play video games because they would rot my brain. But it was actually the thing that was exercising my brain. And now she's the one going down YouTube rabbit holes, so it just flipped.
Venkat
I often think that it's curious with Asian parents have, there's this cliche trope of don't watch TV or whatever. Go practice a piano, for example. And I imagine there was a time in the 18th century or whenever, then the piano was the full new video game equivalent and there were like 18th century kids who were like wasting all their time playing the piano. And then their parents are probably lecturing them. Stop playing the piano, go read the Bible, or something like that. I often think of how culturally relative and historically relative these things are. Like it could be that in 50 years there will be your generation of people talking to your grandkids and saying. Hey, stop doing whatever shit you're doing and go play some more video games. That's what's good use of your time!
Brian Gold
I know you're a huge reader and I think, you already have, a great list of books to read on your Ribbonfarm blog. What are you reading these days and what are you recommending to people most. I guess it's a two part question.
Venkat
It's been scattered. Let's see. I start a lot more books than I finish. One I'm partway through is this book called Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong. He's an economist and he's got an interesting theory of what actually accounts for the dynamism and prosperity of the last 150 years or so. So, I would recommend that. It's a good book. Science fiction. I just finished some Octavia Butler. I started reading Neil Stephenson's Terraforming, but I don't think I'm gonna finish it. It's a little dull. Yeah, books have been hard lately. I go through phases where I either read a lot and binge a lot. Maybe reread a lot and other times when I don't read much at all. Oh, yeah. One I finished recently was Ted Chung. So Ted Chung has mainly short stories and it's an interesting kind of science fiction, but sometimes it looks like fantasy on the surface. And he has like a theory about that, like what's the difference between science fiction and fantasy. And his style is Borghese. So Chung is interesting. Some of it is like overrated, but some of the stories were really good. So yeah, I think I'll probably be in this low reading phase for a few more months and then I'll probably get another burst of enthusiasm and read.
Brian Gold
Thanks for that. And then I guess last question, just to wrap it up and, just personal the question for me, I think a lot about money and marketing and, I aspire to write about it and distill these principles in the way that you write about, tech and culture as well. I know I remember somewhere where like you, you appreciate like David Graber's work on like debt, but you had some like criticisms about it. I was just wondering, that doesn't have to be the main question but rather do you have any like thoughts about like how money and marketing has evolved or, how they work or any new interesting theories in your head?
Venkat
Well Graeber, not to speak ill of the dead, he's, he was an influential figure who started a lot of important conversations, but his views were so extraordinarily colored by his politics that it became too hard to separate the good ideas from motivated against the people he disliked, which included basically everybody who disagreed with him in the slightest. And I happened to be in that upset camp when he was alive. I was starting to review a bunch of books and I mentioned that I was reading Graeber's Debt and that I didn't think a whole lot about it. But even that passing comment, looks like David Graber spotted it and he posted a comment on my blog. I was really mad about it, so I ended up not reviewing the book on my blog because I didn't want to get into a flame war. But later, a little bit like that kinda like went back and forth on Twitter and he blocked me. So David Graeber is one of the dead people who has me blocked and I'll never see his tweets from my account.
Venkat
Anyway. Yeah, that's not the main question you asked. Yeah. Money and but marketing, I don't really, honestly think about it much. I, it's not a natural frame for me to think about anything. I think about it when I have to in the context of consulting gigs. But it's always secondary for me. But yeah money is interesting. Things that are happening to money. And I think the crypto boom has forced a lot of us to reevaluate what money really is, how we relate to it. Is it meaningful? Is it the things people just make up. The FTX collapse that we are all talking about now. One of the things that happened there was FTX, because it's a crypto company, was able to just make up tokens and establish its network in terms of completely fictional tokens that it was right circulating with its partner Alameda. So money at a very fundamental level is evolving right now and in whenever technology as important and fundamental as money evolves in a fundamental way, there's gotta be like, lots of both very interesting, positive things that happen and dangerous things that happen.
So I think on a personal level in relating to money it's gotten harder than when I was young and there was no such thing as crypto and money simply meant, dollars and rupees and other like regular, fiat, national currencies. You didn't even think about it. You thought about your life in terms of yes, I need a certain amount of money to live. I need a certain amount of money to live well by my aspirations. And beyond that, maybe money itself is a motivation and I wanna be rich to validate my sense of self worth or show off to my friends or whatever. I never had that third category of motivations. So I never wanted to like, get rich for getting rich's sake or proving myself on Wall Street as a investor or things like that. I would like to be richer than I am, but it's not a primary motivation. But for people, especially young people..
Brian Gold
We can work on that together.
Venkat
Yeah. For people entering the economy today, I think it's a dangerous time where you have to, you're forced into not just developing your personal relationship with money as an individual, but also navigating this very uncertain period where money as it exists in the world is undergoing a lot of flux. Especially if you play around with crypto technologies and things like that where yeah, it's easy to let it go to your head. But yeah, I think it's yet another of those tools. Any other tool where it's a great servant, poor master, and if you let it define who you are, yeah, it'll dehumanize you. And it's a risk that's always been there in history.
Brian Gold
Yeah, you have a great framework about soft technologies like code, writing, and money. And that's why I ask. And then, there's this, you are also exploring a series about the end of the nation state, right? And you have a series, After Westphalia. There's so much flux happening. And then, even Charlie Munger has even said his hypothesis for the dollar is that in the next a hundred years it's going to zero. And then, also Balaji and I've worked with him on some stuff, and followed his work. And it's like this idea of collapsing institutions and, the nation state can be like built again. Can you help us, like orient ourselves here? Like in terms of what our relationship or how we should think about the nation state, especially like the United States, like when their Debt-to-GDP ratio is 3 to 1. Is that a thing that we should be concerned with? And I know these are big questions, but I guess the apparatus of the nation state is an interesting one.
Venkat
Definitely people should be paying attention to it. But at an individual level, like we are not central bankers. We don't play with interest rates. We are not presidents and prime ministers generally. We don't start wars and stuff. But I think the idea of being member of the human species and a citizen of the world and humanity and being like, not just humanity life itself being connected to all life. When you start with that perspective and you look at constructs like nation states and histories that flow through them one of the things I think that's very important is to ground, ground your sense of who you are and what you stand for and what you value in life in something other than political constructs like nations or if you are attached to a particular post nation state world a world of city states, even there it's important not to get attached to like political constructs.
Venkat
And by that I mean something like, very un-ironic patriotic ethno-national sentiments of the American right is a good example and we in every country is an example of that. It's like there is nothing fundamental about this idea of America or China or India or whatever it is. It is just an idea. Bunch of people made up at some point and maybe wrote a constitution or something about it. It's a bunch of like mechanisms that people invented that are used to govern as society. These are not religious artifacts that you have to get religious about or have religious wars over. It's most important to be I don't know, human first than a member of a nation.
Second. So I think for the average person, centering your sense of what it means to be humans somewhere, other than the political realm of constructed realities that are getting undermined right now. That's an important thing. And if you, for example, have the resources and privilege to be able to travel, I think one of the most important things you can do in today's environment is to travel. And this is, by the way, something that has become significantly harder. Like when I graduated college in '97, people were in peak globalization. Everybody was like bullish on a globalized, connected world. The idea of being a global citizen was like a positive, attractive one. And now we are at the other end of the cycle where it's like borders are going up everywhere and people look with suspicion that anybody who claims like globalist sensibilities, but being a globalist does not mean being a rich asshole, billionaire flying around in your private jet from Davos, just ski resorts in Austria or whatever it is.
Venkat
That's not what it means to be globalists. Like you go around the world, if you are fortunate enough to travel, you'll notice that 90% of like globalism consists of, for example, blue collar workers who are going from like parts of Asia to other parts of Asia doing construction labor. There's like massive migration. There's trade. I think it's really important to travel and see how the world is in other parts of the world, how other regions govern themselves, how other nations make sense of their own histories. How different nations feed themselves as exceptional in different ways. America is not the only country that thinks of itself as exceptional.
Venkat
So I think travel is really important. Learning other languages is really important. Even watching TV from other parts of the world my wife and I watch a lot of Korean TV. I still watch a lot of Hindi movies and stuff when I can. It's important to like really do that sort of thing and in whatever way you can afford, whether it's travel, whether it's just watching TV, really ground yourself in the idea that you belong to the planet and to the human species first, and to made up political constructs after. So yeah, that's how I would think about the after Westphalia line of thought. And I do have like more abstract stuff I'm writing about in the essays and Balaji has some good thoughts on his Network State line of thought. So there's a lot of people doing thinking about this stuff, but I think the fundamental thing everybody has to do is ground their humanity in actually being human as opposed to an American or a Chinese person or something.
Brian Gold
I think that's a beautiful place to end. Is there anything you want to plug, where can people find you? Obviously the Art of Gig one and two are both out. I'll be posting links and doing all the contextual stuff.
Venkat
Yeah, I have a site called Venkatesh Rao.com where it's like my hub for going to my blog, my newsletter, all my books and my background in consulting and so forth. So that's what people should check out if they don't know who I am. And I used to be very active on Twitter and that used to be the place to find me and just chat with me. These days I don't like the Musk-ified Twitter as much, but I'm on a new sort of blockchain-y kind of version of Twitter called Farcaster, which I think is gonna be a very interesting place to be in the future. If you're on Farcaster, follow me there and yeah, that's a good place to chat.
Brian Gold
Thank you so much Venkatesh. I really appreciate you and your time.
Venkat
Thanks for having me.
Venkatesh Rao, (Venkat) is a writer and consultant. Although he abhors the word, he is in my eyes, a strategist's strategist. He's consulted for Tesla and a16z, co-developing the thesis 'Software Eats the World'.
He is the founder of the Ribbonfarm blog and the author of several books you can find below.
Tempo | The Gervais Principle | Be Slightly Evil | Crash Early Crash Often | Breaking Smart, Season 1 | Breaking Smart Archives: 2015-19 | The Rust Age (4 volumes) | Art of Gig (2 volumes)
He holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering (2003) from the University of Michigan. Between 2004 and 2006, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, working on command and control systems. From 2006 to 2011 he was a senior researcher at the Xerox Research Center, Webster (now part of PARC). He had released the Art of the Gig, in book form. At the time of this interview he was a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and working on a new book, the Clockless Clock.
Find Venkatesh:
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