JAKE is a pseudonymous podcaster who interviews some of the most interesting people in tech and web culture, from Vitalik Buterin and Mark Cuban to “LindyMan” Paul Skallas. JAKE also writes a blog, develops experimental crypto projects, and served as Chief of Staff for Balaji Srinivasan. I asked him if he would do an e-mail interview / free-flowing conversation with me, and he generously obliged.
Mon, Aug 19, 2024 at 3:12 PM: Jackson:
Hey JAKE. I want to start off by asking you about aesthetics. There seems to be some sort of minimal, calm, zen-like style to everything you do, whether it’s the title “POD OF JAKE,” the blue circle logo, the aphorism-like posts, and now the colors NFT collection. It’s like a common thread for these projects — where does this come from?
Mon, Aug 19, 2024 at 3:32 PM: JAKE:
Hey Jackson, thanks for doing this. It's an interesting question. My initial answer would be, I don't know. "I don't know much, but at least I know that" is one of my core principles actually. I originally heard that line in Good Will Hunting, the part where Ben Affleck's character tells Will that the best part of his day is when he knocks on Will's door and for a moment he wonders if maybe he just up and left. That's my favorite movie probably. And that line is great. He's talking about not knowing much but knowing that specific thing. I repurposed the line to mean that I don't know much, but at least I know that (I don't know much). I later found out Socrates had a similar line "I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." It's always good when you think you came up with something only to find that Socrates said it first.
Anyway, on the aesthetics, I think it's just a part of who I am and it's always hard to say how you got to become who you are — nature vs. nurture, etc… but I like simple things. I like fundamental. The more stuff there is the more junk there is, so I like to be more minimalistic.
I can speak to a few of the specific examples you brought up. The title for my podcast, POD OF JAKE, seemed natural following my blog, Blog of Jake. I usually check domain names and sometimes social media handles as part of my naming process so when I first went to start my blog I started by seeing if jakesblog.com was available, and it wasn't so I tried blogofjake.com instead and that worked so I went with it. The blue dot logo is just my favorite color combined with the most fundamental shape. In a world of clutter I think simple stands out and I figured if I could succeed to a point where people saw the blue dot and they thought of me that would be pretty cool. I had no idea then that I would one day create a crypto collection for every color on the internet but it's certainly a nice coincidence that I've used a single color logo for everything I've done on the internet for 4+ years now. I love when life works like that.
Mon, Aug 19, 2024 at 7:48 PM: Jackson:
“The wise man knows he is a fool.” I think Shakespeare also said something like that. And also Slightly Stoopid. All the greats.
When it comes to style, I imagine “I don’t know” means you’re operating from a place closer to intuition than reason, which is probably great for creativity. But if I were to give an explicit reason why it works, I think it has something to do with care — a sort of quality over quantity thing. Everything is accounted for. I think Jony Ive said this — you can tell when love has been put into something. So maybe, in that way, it has actually nothing to do with minimalism, and if it’s a project that takes a lifetime or a large, coordinated team, then it can be maximal. Like a Scorsese film or the Sagrada Familia, etc. As long as it still comes from that same spiritual place.
I read an Alan Watts quote this week: “The world is filled with people who do not love the work they are doing,” being the reason why so many products seem sort of pretty on the outside but empty and stale on the inside. Like an office desk made of fake, plastic wood. I don’t necessarily think everyone needs to love their work, that’s probably not possible. There are a lot of ugly, brutal things that need to get done. But I also feel people are too quick to sacrifice the other side of the equation, to immediately give into financial or practical considerations. And that’s when all the soul disappears. I realized sometime ago that almost every product or work of art I loved – the iPod, the LiveStrong bracelet, Blonde by Frank Ocean – were made, not out of financial interest, but out of passion. Every single time.
There may be some sort of survivorship bias here, that for every Steve Jobs and Martin Scorsese there are thousands of failed entrepreneurs and artists that let their passions cloud practical considerations. I don’t know.
Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 10:04 AM: JAKE:
I like what you said about care, and I agree. I said something similar recently in regards to Base Colors. One of the things I love about how simple it is is that it allows me to try to get every single little detail right. To your point, the only way to care for every detail for something complicated and complex is with a large team, because there are way too many details for one person or a few people to pay the proper care to all of them.
If you treat caring about the details as optional then, sure, why not add a bunch of stuff. If you add something good, maybe you can distract from the bad, I guess would be the logic, to the extent that there is any. But I don't like that way of thinking. I like to add things for a reason, because they are great, or because they seem right, or just because I like them.
I think the way of the world defaults to people becoming cluttered over time — too much thoughtless adding and not enough thoughtful removal. We accrue things over time — clothes, pens, and other things in the physical world; email subscriptions, website accounts, and desktop files in the in the digital world; even laws and policies that no longer make any sense and can quickly become counterproductive at a state or national level.
I try to add thoughtfully and remove regularly, not necessarily to counter the default of the how most people do things, but because I feel it's the right way do things, independent of how other people do them, which just so happens to be pretty opposite.
Mon, Aug 26, 2024 at 7:43 PM: Jackson:
That's an interesting point, how clutter seems to collect in every form — mental, physical, digital — unless you consciously guard against it. It seems like a subset of Entropy Theory, where all things not only drift to disorder but also experience some sort of accumulation. I find this to be true in coding as well — it's much easier for teams to write code than to delete it.
Before we get to Base Colors, I want to ask you about your initial claim to fame, at least for me, which is POD OF JAKE. In my view, podcasts are the most interesting form of media happening right now. I think they’re in their own golden age, like TV in the early 2000s or music in the 60s. There are endless interesting long-form conversations happening all across the internet. At the same time, they have this funny, non-serious culture; you wouldn’t brag about being a “podcaster” the same way you might brag about being a writer — which I think, to be clear, is a good thing; it keeps the genre focused on substance over status.
Are there any podcasters that you think are particularly great at their craft?
Sat, Aug 31, 2024 at 6:18 PM: JAKE:
Podcasts are probably my favorite form of media right now as well, and probably have been since I started listening to them regularly around the time I started my own show 4 years ago. I generally prefer medium/long-form media primarily because it provides room for context and nuance where short-form media does not. It also feels healthier for my attention span, and just generally. Something about TikTok and almost every other major platform trying to become more like it feels increasingly unhealthy.
In regards to your question, there is no single podcast which I listen to habitually. I prefer to search for podcasts by the guest that I want to hear speak, since the conversation usually revolves around the guest more-so than the host anyway. Searching by guest allows me to sort of “follow” anyone vs. being constrained to following only people who happen to have podcasts, which seems like a lot of people, but it is actually quite a small percentage of people — roughly 1 out of every 2,000 people it looks like. At least half of all podcast episodes I listen to are in preparation for an upcoming guest of my own, so I sort of binge listen people for fixed periods of time and then after my episode’s recorded I move on to the next — it’s like a forcing function for learning. That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed about podcasting.
All that said, my general perspective on podcasters is that there are a lot of really underrated podcasters out there who are making a genuine effort to produce high quality content, and I think it’s a shame that media, like many things, ends up being such a dramatic power law distribution, where the top podcast gets more listens than 100,000 other podcasts combined, or whatever the specific stat may be. When I look up a guest, I intentionally prioritize listening to their appearances on shows that I have never heard of or are lesser known.
Don’t get me wrong — I think guys like Rogan and Huberman are exceptional at what they do, but there are a lot of shows that are popular that are just not much if at all better than the 24-year-old with 78 subscribers on YouTube recording his 29th episode which he knows isn’t going to get much attention — by virtue of the fact that he is not making any money, and he is not getting many listeners, he is doing it because he wants to. I think genuine curiosity may be one of the most important attributes of a great podcast host and the up & comers like that tend to be hungry and have a lot of that.
Thu, Sep 12, 2024 at 9:58 PM: Jackson:
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. So many of my favorite musicians, for example, make barely any money. The internet democratized content creation — you don't need to be sponsored by a record label to release an album — but it also created global, hyper-efficient competition. You see this in dating as well, the speed with which people sift through profiles and meet for a date; endless options, it's the commodification of people. If democratization is the positive spin, commodification is the negative.
I'm (extremely slowly) writing a series of essays called The Virtualization of Everything which basically tries to capture this shift in society in a clinical, nonjudgemental manner. It basically accepts Marc Andreessen's premise that "software is eating the world" and asks "then what?"
Thu, Sep 19, 2024 at 7:52 AM: JAKE:
"The commodification of people." That's a bit jarring. Commodification is an interesting reframe on democratization. For the series, are you writing it slowly and consistently or are there big gaps between times in which you are working on it, making good progress in short stints? My guess is the latter. I have things like that too.
For example, I want to publish my analysis of Jeff Bezos' 20-something years of shareholder letters. I've already analyzed them and I have my notes throughout (by hand) and I copied those onto my computer (typed) and organized them in a way that I think can be well translated into a final publication, but I haven't touched it in a year (when I digitized and organized), and it was at least year before that that I last touched it previously.
I wonder if when people say they have been working on a book for years, sometimes that's all they mean. I wonder if it could have been done in a month. I'm sure some books actually do require years of consistent work, but it could be a lot fewer than I generally assume.
Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 8:09 PM: Jackson:
The Jeff Bezos shareholder letters analysis sounds fantastic, I'd love to read that. Perhaps you should release a chapter and see where it goes.
For your first question — definitely big gaps. I've barely touched it since Part 1. That series is really for me, to figure out my own ideas, but it's also nice to send something out to the universe and see what comes back.
One puzzle that has stopped my progress is trying to figure out where crypto fits into the "virtualization of everything." You'll often hear that blockchain's core innovation is its ability to give “physical properties to digital objects”. If you buy Bitcoin, or an NFT, or a Base Color, you truly own it, no platform can take it away from you. Existing web2 assets, like profiles and username handles, are essentially lent to you and can be revoked instantly without notice. Don't quote me on this, but I believe when Facebook rebranded to Meta they swiped the @meta handle, which had 1 million followers, with no explanation. This is not an ideal situation if the world becomes increasingly virtual, where more of our valuable assets exist online. Crypto's promise might be to act as a sort of twist or escape hatch to this problem.
I’m often asked by friends that don't work in tech if crypto will "make it." My response is — where AI is inevitable (due to reasons like national security), crypto is a choice that society is going to make. Farcaster is a better platform for creators than Twitter (assuming equal distribution). Blockchain rails are better for financial settlement than SWIFT. And so on. But there is a lot of money and vested interests in keeping these existing institutions as they are, and crypto has had a hard time explaining itself to the broader public. And so crypto’s future is uncertain, except perhaps for Bitcoin, which feels inevitable.
You've now released a few projects in crypto — I believe a token a while back, and recently Base Colors. I feel like we've been introduced to fire, and we're all trying to figure out what we can do with it. What motivates you with these projects?
Wed, Nov 20, 2024 at 8:33 AM: JAKE:
It's interesting how you frame crypto as a choice, pointing to AI as inevitable by contrast, and citing the example of national security to support that. But then you talk about crypto and how it is objectively better in at least a couple of contexts. And I agree with you that; just like AI can improve national security, among other things, crypto can improve many existing systems as well. And so, to the extent that the ability to make objective improvement makes something inevitable, they both should be. However, only AI is considered so because it is improving the power of the state, while crypto is regarded as a choice because it is improving the power of the people while wrestling a lot of power away from the state, big tech, big banks, and mainstream media in order to do so. So we can call that a choice, and, this word is overused, but we can also call it a revolution, because I think it will be a matter of how strongly the people are willing to stand up to the state and big tech and the banks and the media and say these models aren't working for us, even when a lot of people's lives are reasonably good, these big tech apps we use work really well and are super addicting, the financial system as we know it depends on these big banks, and the mainstream media still has such wide distribution — though that one seems like it may be the first to lose its grip, not to crypto but to social media more generally, and perhaps something more integrated with crypto thereafter.
Lastly, on my personal motivations, I tend to be attracted to things I think are interesting and fundamental. So it is hard for me to focus on the details of a specific accounting problem, but I can get very interested in a technology with the potential to change the nature of money, become the foundation of our global financial system, and perhaps beyond that go on to restructure the way society organizes itself into nation-states as we know them. I'm not particularly interested in the cure to any specific disease, although I hope we cure them all of course, but it is easy for me to become interested in technologies that have the potential to slow or reverse aging itself, because whereas curing a specific cancer may give someone an extra few years of life before they end up passing from a heart attack or another cancer or some other age-related disease, slowing aging by 20% could theoretically add another 15-20 years to the average lifespan. You could say I like moonshots, but I don't think crypto nor anti-aging technologies are moonshots. Neither is a literal moonshot anymore (space travel). These technologies that many years ago either seemed like science fiction or were not even considered or imagined now seem extremely possible and feasible. The question seems to be more a matter of when and how rather than if.
Now I don't expect that I'll have anything to do with getting us to Mars, and I won't be the one in the lab who discovers the magic therapy that allows humans to live longer, healthier lives. But crypto feels like it lives at the intersection of the things I'm interested in and the things I'm capable of, it's a space in which I feel I have everything I need to be able to experiment and try things and play. And so that's all I've been doing really, playing around with things. Most recently, this led me to launch Base Colors, the 1/1 collection for every color on the internet. Even at a more detailed level this matches what I describe above in that colors are far more fundamental to the internet than a given dog coin project where maybe the dog is wearing a hat and is a little cuter than the original doge (nothing against dogwifhat coins, of which I do own a few). And so I expect to continue to try things in these areas in which I am interested. I am motivated to follow my interests and act on them. That's really all it is. And fortunately, investing in crypto has given me the opportunity and the freedom to control my time and to do that. It's been the interest that has allowed me to continue to pursue my interests. So for that I am thankful.
Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 9:55 PM: Jackson:
That’s an interesting framing on the societal shift, and likely a step closer to what’s actually happening. Since our last correspondence, Trump was elected, so perhaps America has made a choice on crypto (among others).
It’s interesting because as far as big media, big banks, big tech — I essentially agree with you. They are entrenched, and they have no incentive to improve or give up control. The World Wide Web, the original decentralized protocol, seems to have finally conquered the first one. Perhaps blockchain will conquer the remaining two.
But that word Revolution. That’s a spicy one. I think we as Americans tend to have a rosy view of revolutions because our country was born from one that succeeded. But most revolutions go awry — they either fail or get hijacked. You start off with Voltaire and Marx, and you end up with Napoleon and Stalin.
It reminds me of that Beatles song, “Say you want a revolution?”