Pivot

This was a different kind of project for me too. Usually my journalism is sort of embedded first person journalism where if I'm writing about somebody I'm trying to go and be there with them.

So instead I tried to figure out how can I still tell intimate personal stories about what's happening in people's lives at this historic moment without my eyes without seeing them without being there in person.

And so I started making these really long phone calls to people whose lives were being sort of upended by the pandemic and sometimes talking to people for 15, 20 hours over the course of a week to sort of write about what they were dealing with in real time as the pandemic worsened.

But initially it was mostly very long phone conversations, FaceTime calls. And then also having people sort of share their text messages, their Facebook posts, all of the things from their own lives with me.

I mean, I think really the reason was like my own compulsion to get outside of my own little pandemic bubble.

She introduced herself to me as Desani, like the water.

She's not, she's a gifted and amazing girl but she's quite representative of the problems that she was surviving at the time that I met her.

It's not just about creating enough shelter or enough affordable housing. It's also about creating greater opportunities in the neighborhoods that the vast majority of New York's homeless come from.

She's most recently, I think she would say that she is not escaping poverty per se. She remains with her mom and Brooklyn and her sister and her brother. She doesn't want to escape the neighborhood that to her feels like home even though she has been in and out of homelessness.

The hope is really a personal thing for this family. When it comes to policy prescriptions, my hope is that people read this book and can potentially get some kind of new window into seeing how these policies play out on the ground and also perhaps challenge their own notions of what it means to be successful, what it means to be happy.

Thiel told a confidant that basically Zuckerberg had cut a deal.

I don't know again it could have been maybe this is a tacit deal or maybe this is just a wink-wink or something like that.

I think Thiel has had a big influence on Zuckerberg's ideology, his worldview.

I mean, I think he's interesting cause look he's as you say, one of the most important not the most important sort of venture capitalist.

And then I interviewed Dave Eggers, whose new book is called The Everry. And it's about Amazon and Google merging, a company of a merger between an Amazon Google kind of companies, which can you imagine?

The name of the company is The Everry, which I love the name.

I wanna see what Elon Musk is doing with his rocket program. I think there's a way to do it that's valued in humanity. The Bezos way paying people $15 an hour, a sub-living wage. They hold on to that like it's such a badge of honor.

I did have a lot of lead time with this book quite frankly. I only had six months to write it which is very short turnaround time so I wasn't going to have a whole lot of time to go out.

This story was so mammoth to go out and try to get new information on Epstein at the same time, write a book that's 100,000 words in six months.

as journalists we don't write a lot about how we get the story and all the steps and the blood, sweat and tears that sort of goes into putting together a story

I thought maybe it would be good to tell you explain to the public all that we go through in order to get these stories.

it's called Perversion of Justice the jeffrey eppstein story by the very fantastic Julie K Brown

He has a book out that I hope people check out. It's called Never Shake Hands with a War Criminal. Oh yeah. And it's about Henry Kissinger, but about a lot more than that.

I think that the sort of like short version of the book and what we found was like trying to follow the money because we knew a lot about WeWork beforehand. And so this was sort of like, why did so many smart investors and a lot of them actually were smart investors and CEOs of the largest banks get very personally involved and bullish on WeWork and how did like, the whole financial sector convince itself that the country's most valuable startup was really actually just a mirage, right?

And then another facet on the investment side was just like, there was a lot of stuff that seemed really dumb on the surface. It's like, oh, SoftBank commits to spending $4 billion after a 12 minute tour and in the second largest startup investment ever.

And so you could get the, that plus the charisma of this really magnetic salesman, Adam Newman would mix with a fear of missing out. And so then suddenly you had Fidelity and Tiro price and SoftBank convincing themselves that, oh yeah, well Adam's really charismatic. He convinced me in the room that this thing is a tech company and is gonna just like take over the world in a few years.

It's modeled after Bezos and Jobs neither of them had founder control. Bezos just don't 40% of the stock and Jobs got fired.

And so that like stuff like this is gonna happen. There's gonna be other we works where if it's not Tequila and Jets it's gonna be like rum and yachts and there's gonna be really big implosions if you just have this concept where founders are immortal beings and you give them full control.

Only I can fix this. It's just like that. Which is the book about Trump that's on the bestseller list. It's the same level of sociopathy that affects all of these folks.

I'm just reading one of the Trump books in Michael Wolf book, and he just keeps going. Like, they just don't...

It's about a couple of old white guys but it's really a nice show actually.

I think the star of the show is Alan Arkin and the woman who plays Michael Douglas's daughter I think they kind of steal the show but it's um it's a really well done elegant show and I've never been a big fan of Michael Douglas but he's outstanding in this he's I really

So my book, The Ascent of Information is a big idea. It focuses on a very big and kind of strange and provocative idea, which is that if we look at us as a species, what is so interesting about us is that we generate and utilize and propagate all of this information that's not encoded in our DNA.

And so obviously in my book, I go to a lot of lengths to draw together the arguments to support that hypothesis. But what's interesting about that is that when you start to look at the world this way, that we coexist with this entity, this data-owned, and we're reliant on it just as it is reliant on us.

And it's pretty apparent that there are a lot of aspects to what goes on with Facebook that are kind of detrimental to humans. Right, fake information, endless pictures of your lunchtime sandwich or your cat or whatever, apologies if you have cats or dogs.

But from the point of view of the data-owned, it's fantastic because the data-owned does what everything does that's under the umbrella of Darwinian evolution. It persists into the future, it expands, it fills in new niches, it just takes over.

So the book is really an exploration of that basic idea and it digs deep into information theory and to evolutionary biology and just into the physics of information.

I did this book because I had had all of these experiences of my own that I hadn't talked about.

And also I felt like still even with the film which was on HBO, somehow the critique of dating that I hear from all of my sources from young women and men too on Twitter on social media doesn't make it into the mainstream discussion.

And it just hasn't translated into how we talk about Tinder and Bumble and Matt Troop. And it's really, I think important to talk about because they've done this sort of monopolization of one very central aspect of human life which is intimacy.

There's a very big theme in the book because it was through my own experience with dating mostly younger men because when I went on Tinder, there weren't a lot of people my age.

I do not think people should use them. I think they're harmful. I think that they're bad for you.

I read Ed and Nabi Danen's book, The Corpse Out of Familiar Face.

Tim's book, his 2019 book was The Curse of Bigness antitrust in the new Gilded H. Obviously there's a lot of books coming up. It's a great book. Yeah. That is a great book. I read like two books a year and that was an outstanding book.

There's a share of Frankel and Cecilia Wang who were from the Eric Times who have a book coming out in July that I think is not... It's called The Ugly Truth, I think it's called. Facebook, that's the name of the book.

The subtitle is Nine Rules for Humans and the Age of Automation. I wanted to be more efficient than the 10 Commandments.

I think you need to find work that is or you need to basically find things to do that are not going to be replaced by machines.

One of the things I got from interviewing AI experts and economists from this book is that in the future, things that are done by machines will become very cheap and things that are done by humans will become more valuable.

I think that the sort of what we teach children and what we teach ourselves as adults is really important here. I think that we need to kind of update to the curriculum that we've been teaching people now for 100 years,

It's not enough to attend a coding boot camp anymore. You really have to work on yourself so that you're ready and you're not as replaceable as you might be right now.