Write Like a Billionaire | Chamath Palihapitiya | How I Write Podcast

the best way to Be an Effective writer on the internet in my opinion is to actually be factual I bet Buffett was a big inspiration but what makes a good annual letter yeah I mean I think he's the goat these are master classes in that structure they are master classes tell me about that moment of epiphanies I would like to be a small part of that documentation of capitalism because that is the voting of good ideas money gets to vote on good ideas more money into good ideas more good ideas become good things in the world better for the universe you have the heart you have the soul you have the hotb and you're roaring started in a Punchy way end it in a useful way and you'll be really

successful as you were thinking about writing annual letters I I bet Buffett was a big inspiration but what makes a good annual letter and who did you look at for your inspiration yeah I mean I think he's the goat um I've read all of them in fact you know in um in my office um the thing that's been the consistent Mainstay is is that I've had a printed binder of all of his annual Letters indexed by year in which he wrote them and so it's always something that I've referred back to I would find myself reading random years letters um on the weekends um certain letters of his I've reread probably 20 or 30 times wow what I learned as well was sort of how to write effectively from his letters I think more so than anybody else's there are other people that have also done good letters good public letters but they're more sporadic his is consistently good every year there's something that you can take

away both in terms of what you learn in terms of net new information about how the world works but also just in terms of stylistically the structure of what makes good communication and good Pros he's been um he's been really probably a North star so tell me when you're writing your annual letters what are you going for what has you look at it and just say huh it's pretty good with few things well for me it's a it's a catharsis because my business is not a team sport my business is an individual Pursuit and it's an individual Pursuit against the best version of yourself and even to be even more reductive yesterday's version of yourself sure with this idea that you're constantly supposed to be adding something to something to your toolkit and so what I'm trying to do I typically start writing that I take notes throughout the year so I'll have like a note in my iPhone and if it's like something interesting I write a

kind of a bullet point to myself XYZ just happened or this thing happened or you know here's a mistake I made or here's something that went well or whatever it's like one giant Apple note or something one giant note that's just a running list of the key few things that may have happened in the year um and then typically around February or March of the next year I try to put structure to it and what I'll do is the parts that are research oriented I'll ask my team hey can you double click into this thing in energy or can you double click into this thematic analysis of of rates and none of those things are particularly that subjective so I I get I get help from a lot of folks to help me put the those objective the data the data together as well as the pros around the data but then what I'm doing is I'm writing the intro and the end and all the connective tissue that basically is cathartically

telling my story of the past year what did I go through and most of the time I'm looking at it through the lens of what am I going to think about myself when I read this in a year from now or two years from now because the reality is the letter gets read about a million times which is pretty good but the only person I can guarantee you well most people I would say of the million reads and that's like a page view count or whatever sure um or downloads and all that stuff are our best reading the table of results maybe the intro and probably the conclusion and that's it then they'll scan the rest so most people are reading 10 15 20% of it is would be my best guest there is only one person I can guarantee you is reading that letter multiple times and that's me and there's literally only one person that will ever read those letters years later in my mind which is me and so the value is for me to

understand why did I think that when I thought that what mistake did I make what did I learn and so it has to be a reasonably good accounting but it also has to ignore other people's version of what that accounting should be and so it's it's hard to write Pros for yourself um because it also has to balance people's perceptions of what they want documented in that letter and how they want all of those that information to be um to be accounted for um and so what what what gets lost in these things is like what is the point and you know it's very selfish that point is for me it's for me to be able to say what did I learn what did I try and what is this going to mean in future years when I look back on this

as I try to get better how does your fire manifest itself in your writing right there's been multiple interviews where you go on one you get passionate about something you have the heart you have the soul you have the hoods spun whatever it is that you're saying and you're roaring does that show up in your writing process or is writing a more cold logical analytical process for you there's there's two kinds of writing that I do when I write uh with pen and paper um it's very calculating and and it typically tends to be a mixture of diagrams where I'm explaining things to myself and then dissecting ideas and and I purposely use pen and paper for that because it helps my precision and recall it helps me learn things very precisely and it allows me to learn in a way where I can recall that information um much better in the future but the the more fiery form of writing is what I do online and right typically that tends to

be my more reactive and you know I do that on Twitter and sometimes you know I really I really like that you know takes on a life of its own um you could say that and other times um I'll write in like a Google doc and I'll write the thing that I really want to say because then I can then delete it so I'll say the thing that is the unsayable thing um that is the highly Politically Incorrect thing or the really insecure thing or you know the hurt version of chath kind of lashing out at some external person that may be saying something and I write it um and then I can delete it and then it's cathartic and I can get past it to then say okay what am I really trying to

communicate um and I can get back to the cold analytical self what is it like being the center of attention on Twitter for a 24-hour period it's very destabilizing in what way well I think that like what are Communications meant to do what what what what does one do when one communicates I think there's a small percentage of communication which is let me explain an idea and a concept let me put something into the world that I hope can grow and virally take hold in people's brains it's Inception yep but I think that that's less than 1% of all communication I think that 99% of communication tends to be people processing their own psychological moment in time and online is a very effective mechanism to give you feedback in a real- Time way and so when people are reacting and communicating Real Time online I think they're giving you a snapshot into their psychology and so it took it takes me a

long time the so to really believe that and instead what happens is I'm hurt or I feel like I'm better than you know other folks all because of what I'm reading none of those things are accurate so I think that writing online particularly takes people away from this middle band of just being a highly tolerant person um where most people should be just very tolerant of their faults but also their strengths understand the context of it and be okay with it you know tolerate the anxiety instead I think what what Communication online does is it pushes you into this band where you become arrogant or pushes you into this band where you feel extremely insecure and attacked and the reason why that happens is that 99% of communication are people processing those feelings for themselves yes they are feeling bad they will make you feel bad they are feeling like pretty good so then they'll you know they'll pump you up and then you

feel probably better than you should feel so it's all about regulating and re-regulating your emotions and that's what real-time Communications has both the power to do but also is the downside of it and I've lived both sides and even though I can tell you this in the moment it's very hard to hit the pause button and say oh hold on this is not real so let me just reenter myself and I think that's the biggest challenge and I think that you know for people like me I'm 47 I didn't grow up in this medium it's probably much harder than for what it'll be for my children who I think as far as I can tell understand that Dynamic much more innately now I may be inventing that but it's almost like darwinian it's like you know humans are highly resilient beings we evolve based on our environment to be able to take advantage of our environment through the maximum potential and I I think this environmental stimulus that we've never

had to genetically adapt for may be a thing that our children are better genetically adapted for which is that Dynamic the the pace of communication and its impact on your psychological well-being much better tolerated it seems in younger people than older people tell me about adult children of Alcoholics I think that this book speaks deeply to how writing can move people how it can just be a light bulb in the reader eyes and it seems like that book was really eye openening for you in a profoundly positive way I have this um kind of funny joke that I say is that most books don't need to be read because you can get it from the title um and sadly it tends to be true for most books but this is a book for which that is not true but this shows the opposite of what an extremely well-written book can do which is it gives you the question in such a profound way that it unlocks all the things you didn't know

to ask and so what that book does is it kind of just breaks down all of these ways in which you manifest the neglect that happens when you're raised by an alcoholic parent and I didn't even know th those words or that language I just knew the manifestations and it asked a question or it made a statement and it made the statement in such a benign way I was like yeah I am an adult child of an alcoholic what does it mean and then the way that she John wage who wrote the book the way that she writes is so phenomenal because it's like here is all of these holes that it created and then effectively here are some coping mechanisms really because it's not a solution so she doesn't give you an answer key but the way that that book is written and structured is just so powerful because it it it opened this Pandora's box of oh my God that's me and then you you could just look at the table of contents and it was just so

well organized and and she would give you the answer to each one meaning like you know should say like you know one of the chapters would be like some dysfunction that I had she would just call that's the name of the thing like oh my God I'm that person oh wait I'm also chapter 7 oh hold on I'm chapter 13 as well and and I thought what is going on in this book there are very few books like that now let me contrast and compare that for example I'm a parent I have five kids and one of the the things that I was always afraid of and I was very repressed actually by this idea was do I continue to compound all of the problems that my parents compounded into me do I just compound them into my children and some are easy okay my I was beaten a lot as a kid okay don't beat your kid okay got it um easy to say and for most people actually pretty easy to do like I mean you got to really lose it to want to try

to physically harm your child it turns up because I've seen it and so you know it so it is what it is so okay I was able to do that you know don't be an alcoholic okay I was afraid like am I genetically predisposed to this and it turns out not really it's for me at least it was more of a choice and so I

you know uh other than Wine I've been abstinent of not just alcohol but you know drugs I've never had any of those experiences per se right how were the writing cultures different at AOL versus Facebook well AOL was a highly political organization that was in Decline political in what sense not the common political political in terms of organizational politics organizational politics because it it had executed a a failed hundred billion doll merger every body was you know in a mode of cya um you know people were getting fired left and right um and so it was a very complicated moment for the company but as a result your Communications really mattered because you were judged on the quality and the succinctness and the viability of what you were saying because that was the system of you know record for the business that was the artifact that allowed you to judge apolitically in an otherwise political

environment so email become became a very an email index became a critical resource for some amount of functional dis uh decision-making in an otherwise highly dysfunctional environment Facebook was kind of the opposite or not the opposite if I had to contrast and compare we had a handful of dashboards because you know especially in my part of the business it was an extremely Unapologetic unemotional scientific approach to we're just going to go and dominate the world and we reduced that to growth and acquisition of people and building up Network density and all of the stuff and so we had an extremely scientific way of baselining the business um and so as a result there was just a lot of very poor and sloppy communication because the numbers were just so obvious that all the other stuff was a little bit of window dressing and I think like in that window dressing people didn't take it it as seriously so

I I found myself I remember thinking wow my communication style is too much for this place meaning I had to like dial it back from like an eight to like a four in its Simplicity in its pros in its colloquialisms you know it could be a little bit more crass all the things that I I had never done and had permission to do I gave I had to adapt because then you know otherwise these 22y olds think this 29y old is a lame ass you know and so you just you had to adapt and so my my writing became slightly worse because it didn't matter right you know the numbers were like up and to the right and we those dashboards were essentially single source of Truth

tell me about this cycle that you had acquisition activation engagement verality let's talk about that as it relates to how would a writer think about those four things so the context of that is that there's a there's a guy that worked for me who's still at Facebook he's now the CMO he's an incredible incredible guy at the time was a young man that we recruited from eBay his name is Alex Schulz and Alex had learned that framework from his boss and he taught it to me and I was like this works for us so we went with it but if you had to break it down what the whole concept of it was is like you have to have a problem statement about what it is that you're trying to solve and in that case the equivalent of that was just okay getting people in the door that was the problem so acquisition activation was more of a process of like how do you get them engaged this is like how fast can you make your first friend

on exactly then there was um engagement which is like show them actual product value and then verality which was get them to tell them tell it to others if you're asking me how that translates into writing yeah it's actually the exact same process in many ways which is you know acquisition when you're writing is and and I do this a lot actually in Twitter now because Twitter is away for me to write long threads and stay sharp you know one of the things I realize is that if you only write a letter once every call it year you're going to get rusty um and on the other end of the spectrum I was only writing you know these dumb small little things so then when Elon extended the the product so that you could really write long form I really like that so acquisition is what's your hook get them in and so you know you have to say something that cuts through all of the noise of what people are reading on a

daily basis then activation is really the tldr you have to give them the okay this is why it matters and why you need to pay attention then the engagement part tends to be about the explanation right now a lot of people confuse subjectivity and objectivity so when you explain something I think it's very important to be able to separate what is fact and what is interpretation and I think where a lot of content gets misguided is they don't make it clear enough and so your writing becomes this you feel it it's very hard to describe as a reader but you're like this doesn't sound credible and part of that can just be adding statements like and so you know as a result it leads me to the conclusion that you start to create these demarcations where clear here's where you know objectivity has ended yep and now here's where subjectivity begins and as a reader oftentimes I appreciate that better because I'll throw n I'll throw most of

that away you know Michael M I think went through papers and he used to have one highlighter for what was the objective and one highlighter for what was the subjective just so that he could see the structure because the wrong interpretation of what we're saying is everything should be objective what you're saying here is that the demarcation between objective this is factual reality and subjective this is now my interpretation of such reality those just need to be different and when that's well done it inspires trust writers are not taught how to demarcate this properly and so instead it becomes this convoluted soup where the reader has to figure out where did the fact end and where did the interpretation begin and I think that makes for terrible Pros absolutely useless unreliable pros and typically that's when I'll stop reading you know a lot of people ask me like what books do you read and and mostly I

read no books I read articles infinite numbers of Articles scientific papers Etc I read all kinds of stuff I'll read chapters of books but I'll never read a book end to end and so you know what you're getting it's bad writing is when you don't know what you're getting and the writer themselves is confused and so then the reader themselves has to disambiguate are you lying to me are you trying to shape what I'm thinking or are you telling me what's happening and I think that that makes for very poor writing yeah and then and then so the last part is how you end and the way that I think something has to end is is conclusive but that has to be overwhelmingly objective and the reason is that you want to leave that reader with the Sensation that they are net like you have to think about it as an equation if you invest 3 minutes that's a long time actually if you time out if you just start a clock

and write 3 minutes to read a long form tweet man that is like a that's a lot of time it's uncomfortable to sit in silence for 3 minutes M that's an equation where they are investing or they are paying you in time yeah and I believe again I'm I'm I'm talking about nonfiction obviously but I believe that a good non-fiction writer has to be able to pay that equation back at the end of that time commitment where you have walked away with a conclusion that's net additive you may not agree with it but you feel like again it's a sensation that was worthwhile because it's not as if you are measuring on a clock and saying let me divide this by my annual salary and did I invest you know $945 or whatever you're not saying that yeah um you're you just feel like was it worth it or not and if you if you guinea pig this on yourself the things that are the best reads tend to finish conclusively MH so if you think about act acquisition

activation engagement reality and go back and read um some of Buffett's best letters or go back and read good to great too these are master classes in that structure they are master classes um I haven't done it for my email but I wonder if I went back and I did it I would I would think about how it was structured that way even though it was more you know meant to be more praic and not meant to be you know objective really it was it was all about my subjective truth but I suspect that there that there's a a version of that structure in there it is a really effective structure and so I get to write these long tweets and I try to write three to five a week it just keeps me sharp how do I stay objective how do I demarcate subjectivity how can I just be really Punchy how do I give the tldr how do I conclude objectively so that this person felt like that that reading that was

like a good use of their time tell me about that moment of epiphany so do you feel like the moment of epiphany happens once you have that clear takeaway do you feel like it is like hey no this is more of a routine I sit down takes me an hour and a half and generally after about an hour and a half I get in the flow where on that Spectrum are you I read a lot of content Bloom let's say Bloomberg is a very good example because they also have great graphics and using Graphics allows me to stay objective because it forces me down a path where I have to be more scientific if you look at the ma magazine sell science and nature collectively these are the three most preeminent scientific journals papers in the world this is the smartest most well funded Labs all around the world essentially trying to get published for their breakthroughs there was a study that went back retrospectively and said what percentage

of the papers that are published in cell science and nature are reproducible now why am I asking this question because this is a perfect example of objectivity and subjectivity and confusing the two okay now you know the answer because I just set this up the answer turns out to be 30% is even reproducible forget whether it's a value and forget whether it's meaningful okay forget statistical sign ific and then value because those are other orders of magnitude lower than that barely 30% now those are magazines let call them that I read semi- religiously to understand what's going on in the world confusing objectivity and subjectivity right all the godamn time but it's written in a magazine that you think is 100% objective it's self science in nature it doesn't say David sells science in nature you know it's not chat's opinion on cell science it's called cell science and nature these are objective things that exist in the world

yet 30% are are reproducible which is a way of saying there's a lot of madeup stuff in the world that hides his fact and so you know as a writer you have a responsibility to say what is fact and what is your opinion right you know it's unemotional it's conclusive it's useful it's additive and boom you cut through the Clutter uh so to me like citizen journalism just manifests this equation be factual just a fact sir or just a facts man um started in a Punchy way ended in a useful way and you'll be really successful that's surprised me but it surprised me not because those people exist I think those people have always existed they just now have a distribution format what surprised me is how successful they can be it seems like you were saying this to me earlier you're really doubling down on your talents your gifts as a communicator and seeing that is the path that you want to

walk increasingly is that right I struggle with this question but I think that I'm good at directing energy into ideas and how one does that in part but the large part is through communicating you know if you can start a business that's trying to build a you know form of cancer diagnostic that's an incredible feat of engineering and science but if you can't convince somebody to work with you or for you you that company dies on the vine so that's a communication problem it's not a technical problem per se and there's lots of great technical products that have died and there's lots of inferior products that have succeeded and as far as I can tell the Gap is in how one communicates um and so I do think that you know it's a skill that if you have one productive way and I think that I

have some of it is to try to breathe energy into good companies and you know good ideas that are trying to do important things in the world how do you hone and refine this craft I think that the way that you framed it itself is almost worth investigating breathing energy into ideas I wrote about this company on Twitter catchy title good tldr yeah facts and a conclusion and one of the people that reached out to me was a person that I followed who wrote a lot of stuff about investing and this person turns out said hey can I get connected to this to your CEO this sounds interesting and I just got a call from my CEO today dude you'll never believe this this person is like one of the most senior skilled chemists we've ENT interviewed you know it's going to be a big lift trying to get this person to join but we're going to do our best I may need you to talk to them etc etc okay we don't even know if this person

is going to come join us but it was the ability to breathe energy into that idea and describe it in a way where that person didn't have that feeling that you know is it subjective or objective no that's subjective I agree with that good conclusion I'm on board and he reached out to me because we follow each other hey introduce me I'll take a shot that feels very validating and if I had to give credit it's going to be the CEO on the team that closes this person but 1% of that is the writing it was the writing that allowed that person to say I'm going to explore this further and I have had in een examples this stage zero cancer testing company was because of the same situation this person who read my annual letters reached out randomly through our inbox at Social capital.com and it's now three years later we have a stage zero test for bladder cancer and we're starting to work on a test for

prostate cancer what is my letter my letter was a catharsis but my letter my letter is meant to be large Parts objective y but very clearly delineated sections of subjective catharsis and it allowed that person to say h this person's okay working on interesting ideas one of the things that you've written that I think is just a little paragraph that I've taken and I've said I really like that paragraph I want to go evangelize that message is and I quote start writing your perspectives and publish them the ability for smart useful observations to get into the hands of people with fewer ideas but lots of capital have never been better you can build both a reputation and a balance sheet this way I love that paragraph and I feel like so much of the work that I'm doing at re a passage so much of my own raison deetra for my career is in that little paragraph I think it's a I think I think it's it's sating a lot of things there a

lot of what we we've just spending time talking about but yeah there is a there is a D It's Crazy there is a dir of facts and then there's a dir of objective writing totally and really good writing and really compelling writing I'm sort of always amazed at how many words there are in the internet and yet how much it seems like people are starving for good words and I find the juxtoposition between both of those things it doesn't quite make sense think about like I think part of why is that you know we've trained people on the opposite so is sugar bad not inherently you know if you look at glucose inside of a cell it's critical but too much sugar causes diabetes sure online there's too much of the opposite of good writing which creates the vacuum and the need whether you know it or not for good writing and part of why substack I think has been successful because it gave people the chance to say well you can

vote in a very obvious manner on whether my writing is good or not I think what a lot of that writing is unfortunately is it's too long um I think that you have to appreciate that again there's an evolutionary aspect to humans I used to have both the patience and the mental

training to read in long duration I cannot read for 3 or 4 hours straight I could probably read for 40 minutes you know what kind of writing I wish that you would go back to I think your Cora answers from like a decade ago are quite good they're personable they're open they're honest they're really real and I wish you did more of that I think my biggest problem is I've gotten a little bit gun shy I you know if I use the baseball analogy I feel that I choke up on the bat too much these days I used to be very raw and instinctual and my writing on quora was that it be I saw something and it's Bram published and then what you find is that at at a certain level you get what I call like politician syndrome which is you're always veering between 51 out of 100 people hate you or 51 out of 100 people like you and if you don't have enough psychological resilience that affects you and I believe that my biggest

challenge going back to the book that I you know what you started this with has been that journey and my writing again as I look at the Arc of my writing I think if you measure it in one way you would say it's at a global maximum it's millions of people read this stuff and blah blah blah but I would say to you more honestly it's a it's a little bit of a local minimum I don't think it's a global minimum because I've written much poorer in the past but it's a local minimum and if I compare the style what I'm not getting across is that authenticity and humaness and humor and relatability and it's because I'm stuck in this 4159 seesaw that is in my mind and so you know I I I can see it in my writing that I I agree with you so I'm not as instinctual well so here's I'm a little bit more guarded so I'm going to make a comment two comments so the first comment on a question so the first comment that I think is

interesting is I've read that when you play poker you have lower stakes poker you're a lot more analytical higher Stakes you're a lot more raw and sort of natural flowing is that true yeah so

what I think is interesting then this the question I would ask is do you feel like when you're hanging out with your buddies you're texting the best days for the Allin do you feel like you have that authenticity that relatability and then it gets squashed for public consumption or what's going on there I think that writing is so um it's just one of these very tough things that it just exposes a lot of you yeah I think that when I verbally communicate I can get into a flow State when I write like I said I think that I have gotten into a phase where it's such a permanent documentation and that you know these things come back at you yeah a lot that it makes me second guess my better instincts um and so I have to find a way of recapturing that energy because I agree with you the the the pros and the quality of my writing it was raw it was more on polish but it was so good I felt like I was hanging out with you I

honestly felt like we were in a group chat and and then I but like you know going back to my annual letters you know I struggle sometimes which is I think man it's just so much here but so much of it is should I just strip out the factual and just write a more just like raw two-page letter but then I realize I can't necessarily do all of that um because you know there are winners and losers on both sides of everything that I'm involved in and then so I get back to the 5149 thing in my mind whereas back then I didn't feel a 5149 because I had no stakeholders and now I do like you know if I wrote something which is like this thing sucks that could be a very great way relating to a friend about something but that thing may only suck in that moment and then may start UNS sucking but then if somebody's about to join that thing and then says I'm not going to join chamat says it sucks mhm the implications of all of that now

I've lived after 11 years have caused me to be a little bit more well one of the things that I find works really well with students who struggle with this now you have it differently because you have such a Persona public Persona and I've never faced that but where I would experiment here is going on walks and doing voice transcriptions and getting fired up there and at least this is my plea for you at least having your first draft not

be coming from a place of fear and what is everybody going to think about me and having your first draft come from a place of passion and enthusiasm okay I love that so say more so how how would I do this like if I'm so what you do is like the gp4 transcription is getting really good so what you do is you open up your phone and go walk around the neighborhood and get into it go and have it all there and by the end you'll have a transcript and you can then write from that and I think that if you can start there oh I love this then you won't be starting from Fear because that's what I'm reading in your writing there is the repression and I had a sense that it was there and then I read your core answers and I was like it is there yeah so you know to your point like I mean if I had to then just reframing that maybe why I'm now so married to fact is so that I can hide a little bit because those

facts are easier for me to talk about because I'm afraid of being subjective and there's probably areas where I could probably be a little bit more subjective and emotional it's so I think it's a great it's great feedback well I think look at Gerard Gerard influenced you Gerard is an extremely immen uncareful thinker uncareful he is extremely subjective he has no data behind what he's he's just reading his stuff and he's saying these are my conclusions and yet it influenced you like that and I don't think anyone is reading Gerard for the empirical factual whatever but you just said immensely so imely what's going on there well he does something that I think is very rare which is high quality subjective pros and I guess maybe what I'm saying implicitly is like so you know maybe it's not 99% of Pros is is trashy but 98% is and there's 1% of good fact and there's 1% of good Pros subjective pros

and you know if you're a good writer you're trying to be in those last 2% um as opposed to you know you get you get reductively bucketed into hasht XYZ hasht this hasht that you know so it looks like empirically the brain changes once text gets introduced into society it people get a lot more logical and these writers on basically said that in the grand Arc of human history you had years of an oral culture of people speaking of and it's very emotional it's much more tribal it isn't empirical at all and then you get into this world of text and logic and now we're moving back into what he call secondary orality which is of the internet because even though Twitter is textual there is something in the the vibe is a lot of how a group would engage with the pylons and the drama and the momentum and it's speaks to some big shifts in The Human Condition yeah I think that's very well said I I I I buy

that I mean I think that it I mean look it's reinforces my biases so I want to be careful but I think that that sounds like how I have thought about the world um and you know that's where I think like there's there is value to breathing energy into things how are

you teaching your kids to read and write now to be very honest with you I don't think I'm doing a particularly good job there is no well-written book on book on parenting and so you know if you go across 30 different books on parenting and you you know you look at reading it's all the stupidest ideas like oh you're going on a trip to uh you know uh Pompei well give him this book about the volcano in Pompei and then you you I give it to my kids they're like this book sucks well okay there goes that idea out the window oh ask them what they like and get and it's like that's not how I read you know um and I wasn't a particularly curious reader but it was when I started to solve problems that I became curious about problems and then I started to be I started to read because it was a necessary tool to ignite my curiosity about the problem and I and I loved learning and I loved acquiring knowledge and reading

was just a pathway for for that mhm and so I'm trying to calm my own psychological insecurity and tell myself that my kids you know are going to EB and flow between phases where they read a lot and they don't and I haven't yet the bigger answer I think is I haven't yet figured out what is it that they're curious about learning more about and I think that I hope that of the five enough of them you know if three of five become curious

about it that'd be great you know learning and then you can direct them to read as a tool to expand their learning you use data a lot in your investing process have you thought about using it to improve your writing and if so how would you think about that yeah I mean I think that the one thing that I think I don't have a very good sense of which should be empirically known I think that there's a matrix of when you so if you if you're going to publish short form information from content of any kind I I suspect that the length should be correlated to the the time where it's most likely to be read and so and I suspect that there is at least one standard deviation if not two pro pro probably one between the length and what that means is that the type of information that's best consumed in the morning could be very very short short and the time the stuff that's consumed at night could be very very

long last question how does your background as an electrical engineer change your writing I mean I hear you talk a lot about structure things in your life seem to be well structured well thought out structure is a word that you've used a lot how else does it show up in your writing and your communication it's really important if you're going to take the time to write something down to have a point in doing so you know it's easy to jump in the comments of something and just throw shade okay I'm not sure you're learning anything I'm not sure it's net additive to the body of knowledge of the world um and then there are other things that you know if you were to write it well could be and there are just so many examples of just random people Anonymous people often times now writing things that just just infantes move the body of the World Knowledge forward a little bit yep and so for me the best way that I

improve my odds of writing things that I can look back on and say that was slightly infant tesly additive is if it's structured in a way that I can understand and again I use Twitter just to stay sharp I have drafts saved right and I'm constantly going back to them and I'm read and I'm reading them and editing them in real time I probably edit something 20 or 30 times before I put it out there oh wow and I'm always just I because like I'll say it I'll wait an hour I'll come back to it I'll wait 20 minutes I'll come back to it I'll wait 5 minutes so there'll be and and you can see that it asmp tootes in terms of the the delta T that I take between edits that's when I'm like all right triip it and I'm always just trying to figure out like is it is this good did I learn something even by writing this yeah and so it has to have that structure is that interesting did that get me is that factual am I just you

know is this my insecurity or is this true oh it's my insecurity delete oh

wait why am I saying that that's just so that sounds so dumb that's just me being again insecure oh wait I'm being intolerant of my anxiety here hold on take it I mean so it's like it's like very therapeutic writing for me and I think over time if I can look back and say there's a documentation of capitalism I would like to be a small part of that documentation of capitalism because that is the voting of good ide ideas right that's what money is money gets to vote on good ideas more money into good ideas more good ideas become good things in the world better for the universe but if you communicate bad ideas and bad ideas get too much money then then you slow that progress down and there's a gap between what the counterfactual is and what the actual is and so I want to be a part of that documentation so that as I introduce my version of good ideas they can be voted upon sure and that then potentially they

could be acted upon and then separately that's more on the daily basis and then over the years I want to be able to measure my Evolution and so I force myself to document basically where I am um and I lead with things that are shields for me to your point you know why do I put my returns up top now I'm answering you know you you've gotten in my head why do I do it it's a shield it's a psychological Shield it says no matter what's you know it's my way of saying no matter what's here just remember this right can't hide from that yeah and that's a little bit of a cop out I wouldn't have said that until I talked to you cool well thanks for coming on this was fun thank you dude good to finally meet you too

same